What does it mean?

Where were you at 12:30 on Wednesday, February 6, 2013? The Prime Minister was issuing a statement in parliament following Robert Francis QC’s report on the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust healthcare scandal. The report, which was the fifth into the scandal, followed a £13m public inquiry and revealed failures in multiple layers of the NHS resulting in up to 1,200 unnecessary deaths. Francis said of his 290 recommendations that they represented “not the end but the beginning of a journey towards a healthier culture in the NHS”.

Speaking to medical practitioners the most frightening thing about the Francis Report is that it tells them nothing that they didn’t already know. It seems as though the culture of the NHS has caused organisations to anaesthetise the ethical principles of their staff to the detriment of patient care. Should NHS dentistry be tainted with the same brush?

Candour

Although candour features in the report’s recommendations, the Government had previously announced that it would create regulations requiring the NHS Commissioning Board to include a contractual Duty of Candour on all NHS providers from April 2013. This certainly makes sense since, in my opinion, the best clinicians are not necessarily the ones who practice error-free but those who can communicate errors openly when things go wrong.