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‘The Golden thread’: A New book on patient safety
Introduction If you are a healthcare worker and anything like me, you fear the prospect of being asked to contribute to an investigation that follows a patient safety incident (PSI). An email lands,...
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Life after life: the symbolism of HeLa cells
Henrietta Lacks and her husband David. Reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks caused me to reflect on the sanctity of life, or, more specifically, the sanctity of organic material. As many...
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The WhatsAPP conundrum
The recurring issue of deleted WhatsApp messages got me thinking about the ethics of electronic communication in healthcare. In the case of Nicola Sturgeon (and previously, members of the Westminster...
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Camus’ The Plague – 4 years on
The Plague, by Albert Camus, experienced a surge in popularity as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Now, 4-years later, its parallels with our 21st century experience are harder to identify. There are...
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‘I saw the doctor…’: the Physician Associate controversy
There is a very active and emotive debate in medical circles concerning he role of the Physician Associates (PAs) in the NHS. Council members of the Royal College of Physicians of London have called...
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How far? – on the duty of care to ‘avoidably’ traumatised families
From ‘PTSD Treatment using Art Therapy’ website The Supreme Court judgement against the family of a 7-year old girl who claimed that the NHS was responsible for funding their psychiatric care after...
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Lone voice: on an unhelpful take on assisted dying
As someone who has supported assisted dying, I read Matthew Parris’ recent opinion piece in The Times (paywall) with dismay. He presents the idea that as a society we must be honest in accepting that...
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The GMC and the verdict of history
The GMC’s finding that Dr Sarah Benn’s fitness to practise is impaired raises subtle ethical questions. She was jailed for 32 days having flouted an injunction to desist from attending non-violent...
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Why apologise? Candour in healthcare 10 years on.
In a recent lecture to the European endoscopy community in Berlin, I described how the obligation to discharge the duty of candour was something we need to prepare young doctors for. I thought this...
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The making of a whistleblower
What makes a whistleblower? This is the question I asked myself, sitting in the audience at the HSJ Patient Safety Congress in 2023. Peter Duffy, consultant urological surgeon, had spoken frankly...
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The simplest task? Misidentification in healthcare
The Health Service Journal has published data (subscription required) detailing the number of patient misidentifications in the NHS. The numbers are staggering. Responses to Freedom of Information...
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Deja Vu: half a century of NHS inquiries
In 1965, just 17 years after the NHS was created, a trained psychotherapist called Barbara Robb went to visit a previous client, Amy Gibbs (74), who had been admitted to Friern hospital, Barnet (a...
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The retrial of Lucy Letby
It is with grim fascination that I have observed a gradual but unmistakable swell of concern develop around the safety of Lucy Letby’s guilty verdict given in August 2023. In May 2024 the New Yorker...
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Intervention – why are rogue surgeons not stopped sooner?
As Søren Kierkegaard wrote, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ This aphorism sprang to mind when I read about the disgraced paediatric orthopaedic surgeon Yaser...
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‘The NHS is broken’– rhetoric & risk
The newly installed health secretary Wes Streeting was quick to state that the NHS is broken. This, he elaborated later, is the diagnosis and we must accept it if we are to implement the correct...
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Complexity and Parliament – the limits of assisted dying debate
I attended an interesting and important meeting about the assisted dying (AD) this week. The complex life and death decisions group (CLADD), hosted by King’s College London, arranged a panel...
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