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John Tingle

The current state of patient safety in the NHS: the Darzi Report

Darzi (2024a) covers a lot of ground and issues in this wide-ranging report, which is unsurprising given the vast scope NHS activities. This column focuses on the finding on the NHS health...

Principles and collaborative practices: a roundup of summer publications

The Patient Safety Commissioner (PSC) recently published a consultation paper on draft principles of better patient safety (PSC, 2024a). The principles will act as a guide, the PSC states, for senior...

The urgent need for review, rationalisation and consolidation of NHS patient safety organisations

No doubt the final Dash report on the CQC will also find that the NHS health regulatory, governance framework, patient safety system is too complex, overlapping, fragmented and ripe for reform. This...

Is patient safety in the NHS fundamentally broken?

‘I'm extremely anxious about maternity services. And what frightens me is the issues we've seen raised in relation to Nottingham and Kent – I think [they] are a risk factor right across the NHS, and...

A professional and legal duty to keep up to date

It will be impossible for any nurse or doctor to analyse everything that is relevant to their clinical practice area. They do, however, owe patients a legal duty of care and part of this will be the...

Manifestos for a safer NHS

A fundamental question I also ask when considering election manifestos is how much control governments have over NHS patient safety culture development. Governments come and go, as do patient safety...

Global progress and Never Events

The progress report from WHO offers important insights into strategies adopted, trends, issues, challenges, opportunities and so on. This will be a key resource for all stakeholders in patient safety...

The NHS Constitution: a touchstone or out of touch?

Many organisations have mission, vision or value statements and drafting them is an art. There is a service industry devoted to this:.

Is it right to talk about patient safety rights?

In the legal literature the subject of rights is a hotly debated one. Many legal theorists in a subject area called jurisprudence and elsewhere have debated the matter. It is a useful exercise to look...

Different stakeholder perspectives on NHS safety

An independent expert panel commissioned by the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee (HSCC) has issued the report of its findings on the Government's progress on meeting patient safety...

A palpable sense of frustration with NHS patient safety culture development

Patient Safety Learning (2024) is a charity for improving patient safety that provides excellent resources to share learning. It has recently produced a report analysing the results of questions...

Taking a reading on NHS patient safety: views from the ombudsman

In his Broken Trust report from June 2023, the PHSO reviewed the most serious NHS complaints received by his office where avoidable death has resulted. The review highlighted an implementation gap,...

The challenges facing the NHS in implementing Martha's Rule

The call for Martha's Rule arose out of the tragic death of 13-year-old Martha Mills, who died from sepsis in 2021 at King's College Hospital, London. There was a failure to recognise that she...

Be careful about what you wish for in NHS patient safety reform

‘Patients struggle to navigate the complaints system and it may take some time to find the correct organisation to complain to.’ .

Clinical negligence: should the NHS consider a no-fault system?

‘… costs … have continued to grow at an eye-watering rate. Ten years ago, the NHS paid £900 million in damages; last year it was £2.17 billion – equivalent to the annual running costs of the biggest...

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