By John Tingle
Good record keeping and communication practices are essential prerequisites for safe and proper patient care. Serious patient injury, including death, can result from poor record keeping and other communication failures.
A fundamental issue in England’s National Health Service (NHS) patient safety culture development, however, is whether health care staff implement the necessary communication changes in light of adverse health care events. In fact, failure to learn from errors is a persistent patient safety theme that has featured strongly in various health regulatory, patient safety, and crisis inquiry reports going back over 20 years.