Chief Medical Officer speaks out over NHS errors

17 Mar 2009

The Chief Medical Officer for England, Sir Liam Donaldson says the NHS needs to apologise more for errors.

Writing on the BBC website, Sir Liam says that in developed countries one in 10 hospital patients suffer as a result of medical errors.

He adds that while much work is done on preventing errors and reducing risk, less work is done on what happens in the aftermath of a mistake.

Sir Liam calls on medical staff to make sincere apologies and points to a National Open Disclosure Programme in Australia as an example of what can be done. This programme gives patients and families access to the doctor involved as well as another senior doctor to discuss what happened.

He goes on to say, “The NHS must do everything it can to prevent those errors, but it also needs to be open when they do happen.

Sixty years after its foundation, the NHS needs to learn to apologise more often. And it needs to learn to mean it.”

Guy Forster, an expert in medical negligence at Patientlawyers.com, said "We welcome Sir Liam Donaldson's call for a more open culture of reporting medical errors to patients and their families. Patients should not have to rely on bringing a claim for clinical negligence as their only means of obtaining an apology or an explanation for why their treatment went wrong."

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