I recently spoke at the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management's annual conference on this very topic asking "what is the point of lawyers?" The aim of my talk was to challenge the way clinical negligence lawyers are perceived by the medical profession and to call for a more constructive working relationship.
My personal aspiration is that we are seen not as the enemy, depriving the NHS of resources and inhibiting good leadership, but as a necessary part of the process leading to improvement. I strongly believe clinical negligence lawyers can help in healing trust in the NHS.
Damaged, usually upset, sometimes angry people come to my team when they take issue with the care that has been provided to them or a member of their family. My team hears firsthand of bad patient experiences. We can, in turn, make a positive contribution to highlighting problems and helping to prevent a repeat of mistakes.
My job is not to engender a culture of blame. In a clinical negligence case there is no "guilty verdict". Few cases actually go to trial and when they do there is no jury. There are no powers to strike off. Misconceptions have arisen such that some medics believe that a negligence claim can be a career-ending event. The truth is that 97% of negligence claims are settled without a "day in court". And actually only a tiny fraction of medical situations that go wrong actually result in a clinical negligence claim.
I believe that the NHS could do more to deal with these failures better.
Trust between the organisation and the public they serve will be improved if it is known that the NHS learns from its mistakes by listening to and involving the injured patient. Lawyers can and should be part of that process. Highlighting the patient voice via the legal system can ultimately help to restore that trust.
I do see some positives. Good medical leadership influences legal outcomes. Serious untoward incident reporting is increasingly commonplace and is helpful. There are situations where a member of the treating team has said "see a lawyer". In the current climate that is courageous.
Unsurprisingly, I believe in the need for an organisational duty of candour. Patients want to be informed but, also, my sense is that many medics want to be open too. Again lawyers can help mediate this process. Admitting mistakes is a good thing. In an open and accountable NHS, mistakes should be learned from, not feared.
A junior doctor wrote a year ago in the Guardian "I feel as if I am in the middle of a brutal initiation rite but, of course I cannot let my patient see that … so I am thinking, am I really up to this? Hello, is there anyone around who can help me?"
The challenge for the NHS is to remove the fear of mistake and isolation, to create a supportive health service where it is permissible to be fallible, provided errors are swiftly acknowledged and learned from.
In a complex environment such as the NHS, mistakes will happen and, tragically, lives lost. My hope is that, with strong leadership and a willingness to learn from mistakes and look at them in an open and transparent way, repeated, avoidable and obvious failures become a thing of the past. This will help reduce negligence budgets too.
Lawyers serve the same public as medics and by highlighting the patient voice, we too have a part to play in creating a patient focused, high quality, transparent healthcare system.
This article is courtesy from The Guardian.
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