Tag: Health Law

Red stethoscope coiled in the shape of a heart

The NHS in England Launches a New Patient Safety Strategy

John Tingle Leave a comment

On July 2, 2019 a new National Health Service (NHS) patient safety strategy was launched in England. The strategy promises many things and lays out the future trajectory of NHS patient safety policy making.

Aidan Fowler, the NHS National Director of Patient Safety highlights the scale of the NHS patient safety problem in the foreword to the strategy:

 Too often in healthcare we have sought to blame individuals, and individuals have not felt safe to admit errors and learn from them or act to prevent recurrence…The opportunity is huge. Hogan et al’s research from 2015 suggests we may fail to save around 11,000 lives a year due to safety concerns, with older patients the most affected. The extra treatment needed following incidents may cost at least £1 billion (p3).

 

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A Professional In Vitro Fertilisation Laboratory Microscope Closeup - Image

Professor: The Law Has No Straight Answer for Our High-Tech Baby Boom

Kaitlyn Dowling Leave a comment

This is an excerpt of an article by Alaina Lancaster that originally appeared on Law.com. Read the full interview here. 

After thousands of dollars of in vitro fertilization treatments and nine months of pregnancy, a New York couple was forced to give up the twins they birthed. It turns out CHA Fertility Center, the Los Angeles clinic where the couple sought IVF treatment, mixed up the embryos of three patients, resulting in two of the couples having to give up children to their genetic parents. Now, those parents are suing.

Dov Fox, professor of law at the University of San Diego and the director of the school’s Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics, said the law has not caught up with reproductive technology and victims of this type of medical malpractice aren’t left with many legal options. Yet, legal frameworks are out there, Fox said. Judges and lawmakers just might need to look outside the U.S.

Read the full interview here.

A white hospital hallway

The Latest in the Continuing Cycle of NHS Patient Safety Inquiries

John Tingle Leave a comment

There does not seem to be a week that goes by without an NHS (National Health Service) patient safety crisis hitting the headlines and this has been the case for many years. Major public inquiry reports into patient safety and health quality failings are published. Recommendations are made, and then another crisis event follows soon afterwards spawning yet other reports, broadly saying the same thing.

The NHS has built up a huge back catalogue of inquiry reports into patient safety crisis’s, spanning decades containing a lot of deep thinking, useful analysis and valuable recommendations. Analysing present and past patient safety crisis inquiry reports is a very useful educational exercise and can help inform future policy development in the area. Some of the seemingly intractable, stubbornly persistent patient safety problems that beset the NHS, both past and present are identified and discussed. Revisiting reports and analysis can also refresh our perspective on patient safety issues and provides an information bedrock on which we can base change.

Patient safety inquiry reports also provide a momentum for change through their recommendations which the government of the day can accept or reject. Read More

NHS logo on the side of a building

Testing the Temperature of Patient Safety in the NHS

John Tingle Leave a comment

In terms of transparency and accountability the National Health Service ( NHS) in England is excellent at producing insightful, well-produced reports on health quality and patient safety. It does this on a regular basis and one of the great difficulties faced by NHS nurses and doctors today is the sheer volume of reports published. It’s an impossible task for nurses and doctors to keep up to date with all the reports published and to maintain heavy workloads in resource constrained environments. It’s also hard for health care staff to know which reports to prioritize and which are authoritative.

There is an urgent need for the NHS to create a one stop, patient safety information hub which collects reports from all NHS sites and other important global sites, putting everything into one accessible place. Some recent reports on written patient complaints have been published which are helpful in assessing, testing patient safety and health quality in the NHS. Read More

A group of surgeons perform an operation in a hospital operating theatre.

Keeping up to Date with Global Patient Safety

John Tingle Leave a comment

One of the great difficulties in patient safety and health quality is keeping up to date with all the material that is produced. A myriad number of patient safety and health resources exist globally. By sharing good quality resources, we can help advance the global patient safety agenda.

NHS Resolution (the operating name of the National Health Service Litigation Authority) has excellent patient safety and clinical negligence resources, learning materials and should be viewed as a priority global information source.

NHS Resolution is a Special Health Authority and is a not-for-profit arm’s length body of the Department of Health and Social Care.It is a part of the NHS and has several functions including handling negligence claims on behalf of NHS organizations and independent sector providers of NHS care in England who are members of the NHS Resolution indemnity schemes. Read More

hand of a doctor holding a stethoscope

Patient Safety: The Urgent Need for Global Information Sharing and Learning

John Tingle Leave a comment

Patient harm is the 14th leading contributor to the global disease burden, according to a new report by WHO, OECD, and the World Bank.

In resource-constrained health care environments, it is important not to reinvent the wheel and waste money when existing, proven patient safety solutions already exist in other countries. Global patient safety knowledge sharing, and learning helps all countries, regardless of income level and this needs to be encouraged. Read More

Black silhouette of girl with a pony tail looking down in a dark tunnel

Suicide Prevention and Patient Safety

John Tingle Leave a comment

Suicide prevention needs to be taken more seriously globally by governments, health systems as an urgent public health concern.

WHO (World Health Organisation) states that close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, which translates to one person dying every 40 seconds. For each adult who died by suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds globally, and occurs throughout the lifespan. Read More

Learning from Patient Deaths in the NHS

John Tingle Leave a comment

The independent regulator of health and social care in England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has just published a report on how the National Health Service (NHS) is progressing in the first year of implementing national guidance on learning from deaths.

The report follows on from another published in 2016 which detailed major failings and concerns about the way the NHS investigate and learn from the deaths of patients in their care. The 2019 report contains several case studies which detail experiences of implementing the national guidance. Read More

Close up of a mosquito sucking blood on human skin. This mosquito is a carrier of Malaria, Encephalitis, Dengue and Zika virus.

Malaria Eradication: For Africa as America

James Toomey Leave a comment

There is a page in the history books waiting to be written for the eradication of malaria. In recent years, malaria has killed more people globally than war—it’s killed predominately children, and predominately in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite being curable, and eliminated from most developed countries, malaria is the fifth deadliest infectious disease in the world.

A team of scientists in Italy is looking to write that history. Read More