Health Providers to the NHS will be forced to admit errors in “Transparency Drive”
Last year’s NHS Future Forum, in which Liberal Democrats played such a prominent role, produced a large number of recommendations and most of these were taken on board as amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill. Of particular importance – in view of the larger number of private sector or independent service providers expected in the future – are moves to encourage the learning from, and the reduction of, medical errors by increasing transparency within all NHS providers.
A written ministerial statement was issued by the Department of Health last summer requiring all NHS hospitals to take on a new “duty of candour” and obliging them to tell patients when they had made mistakes. This had been a key demand from the NHS Future Forum. All providers of NHS services would have this new duty written into their contracts as part of the drive to increase transparency.
This “duty of candour” followed close on a study in the International Journal of Clinical Practice, which included nearly 1,500 patients from the UK, which showed that poor co-ordination of the care given to patients was a major factor in medical or treatment errors. Of the 1,434 UK patients in the study, 9% reported medication or medical errors. In 23% of these cases poor co-ordination of the care was involved and, where poor care co-ordination was demonstrated, the chance of error increased by 160%.
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