Tag: clinical negligence

Physical therapist helps person in wheelchair.

Balancing Patient Rights and Costs in Medical Malpractice Claims

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle and Amanda Cattini

The issue of the high and increasing costs of clinical negligence (medical malpractice) in the National Health Service (NHS) in England has long been a contentious one. There are common themes in the debate. The economic arguments supporting reform explain that the NHS is spending a considerable amount of money out of its health budget on malpractice claims, which otherwise could be put into front line health care services.  While the economic arguments are important, others contend that the patient’s voice must be heard more widely in the reform debate. They emphasize that it is important to look deeper as to what compensation means to victims of clinical negligence, and caution against unnecessarily fettering patients’ reasonable pursuit of claims.

Two recently published reports provide several key perspectives on these issues.

Read More

Doctor, DNA, microscope concept illustration.

Reclassification of Genetic Test Results: Potential Time Bombs in the Medical Record? 

Genetics in Medicine Leave a comment

By Ellen Wright Clayton

Findings from genetic tests are not static; as knowledge advances, our understanding of the implications of these results evolves.

But what this means for physicians and their duties to patients is unresolved, as I explain with co-authors in a new article in Genetics in Medicine, the official journal of the ACMG.

There is an increasing drumbeat of support for an ethical and legal duty for physicians to reinterpret genetic test results and re-contact patients about these new understandings to improve their care.

Currently, reviewing prior medical records is by no means routine. Clinicians may review past records if they suspect that they have missed something as symptoms evolve, or that the significance of a symptom or biomarker may have changed because of new research.

Read More

doctor holding clipboard.

Learning from Clinical Negligence Claims: The New NHS Patient Safety Syllabus

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

As part of its patient safety strategy, the National Health Service (NHS) in England has created the first system-wide patient safety syllabus, training, and education framework.

Education and training are fundamental prerequisites for creating a patient safety culture in any health care system. This new patient safety syllabus is both innovative and reflective, combining systems and human factors thinking.

Read More

Photograph of a gavel in front of a British flag

A New Litigation Crisis on the Horizon: Negligent Delays for Non-COVID-19 Patients

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

As the dust begins to settle around the COVID-19 pandemic, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge of possible litigation trends against the United Kingdom’s NHS (National Health Service) for actions taken during the crisis.

Many NHS services have been reduced or suspended during the crisis. Negligent delays in treatment are a common cause of action in clinical negligence and medical malpractice cases. Legal claims could be made by patients who argue that they have suffered, and continue to suffer, because of lack of access to care and treatment due to COVID-19 NHS emergency restrictions. These claims raise tort, public law and human rights concerns, and some law firms have already been approached by patients asking for advice in this area.

Read More

End of year report cards from NHS Resolution and the Care Quality Commission

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

Two key NHS (National Health Service) organisations have recently produced reports. NHS Resolution has produced its annual report and accounts.The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has produced a report on the experiences of adult in -patients in NHS hospitals.These reports are excellent for real-time trend analysis and important patient safety and clinical negligence trends are identified.

Read More

Premature baby left to die alone in sluice room, report reveals: A looming patient safety crisis in the NHS?

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

BBC News reported, 24/11/2016 on the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust review of its Royal Oldham and North Manchester General hospitals which identified several ‘unacceptable situations’. The BBC news item states that the review document

“…described how a premature baby had arrived “just before the legal age of viability” – at 22 weeks and six days – but staff did not find “a quiet place” for the child’s mother “to nurse her as she died and instead placed her in a Moses basket and left her in the sluice room to die alone”.

The report goes on to catalogue a number of other shocking events that occurred. Read More

Patient Safety and Clinical Risk in Neonatal Care

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle                                     

The CQC (The Care Quality Commission)  is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. They make sure that health and social care services provided to people are safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and they encourage care services to improve. The  CQC inspects health facilities and they have important statutory regulatory powers and sanctions.They have recently produced a report on neonatal care and  on  providing care for infants in the community who need respiratory support. As well as some positive findings, the report does reveal a number of major patient safety risks and failings.

In England, one in every nine babies is born needing care from neonatal services and  this is on the increase. The care process here can be challenging with sick babies with complex health needs receiving hospital care and then care at home and in the community. The care of the baby traverses’ distinct pathways or care areas and sometimes problems can occur:

“A lack of consistency in care and communication across a pathway can result in poor outcomes for both babies and parents.” (p.3)

The report looks at current practice in three different aspects of care: Read More

Learning from mistakes in the NHS: a special report by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) into how the NHS failed to investigate properly the death of a three-year-old child.

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

In the UK where health is concerned money is a particularly poor compensator for the loss of a limb, faculty or even a family member. In my experience patients who have suffered adverse health incidents, negligence, more often than not, are not primarily motivated by obtaining monetary compensation. They seek in the main an explanation of what occurred and why, an apology and an assurance that what happened will not happen to anybody else; that lessons have been learned.

The NHS (National Health Service) for decades has been unable to provide a satisfactory complaints and patient adverse incident investigation service which provides these outcomes generally. More often than not patients have to resort to complaining or beginning litigation in order to find out what happened and why and the process that they have to embark on can alienate them even more as they soon hit major and seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. The NHS maintains a defensive and blame ridden culture when errors happen as the terrible events of Mid Staffordshire revealed.

The report Read More

The vexed problem of properly discharging elderly patients from hospital back into the community

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

The National Health Service (NHS) just does not seem to be able to deal properly with discharging elderly patients from hospital back into the community. There have been major issues in this area going back decades. Stories in the media and official reports regularly appear about ‘bed blocking’ by elderly patients or hospitals discharging them back into the community without proper care arrangements being made.

There is a real fear that the NHS will never be able to turn things around here and that the lessons of the past are not being learnt .There are seemingly intractable problems being faced by trusts, social services and others in doing a proper job with elderly patient discharge.The high financial cost to the NHS of keeping well elderly patients in hospital has also been widely discussed.

Hospitals and social services have faced a barrage of criticism of failing to have coordinated care policies and arrangements leading in some cases to deaths of patients.
Two reports have been published recently which show that patient safety is being seriously compromised in this area. Read More