Bristol whistleblower describes his vision of professional monitoring (December 1999)

Summary

Stephen Bolsin, the anaesthetist who raised concerns about paediatric heart surgery services at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, told a BMJ conference on whistleblowing that all doctors should be given regular anonymous feedback about their performance so that they can "blow the whistle on themselves" before serious errors occur.

"Risk adjusted measures of performance can be achieved," he said, "and these need to be anonymously fed back to the people carrying out the treatment. All medics will want to improve their performance once they have seen the data."

He argued that this type of feedback could be an important mechanism of quality improvement.

Related reading:

• Stephen Bolsin: Whistleblower on the Bristol scandal
• Whistleblower in Bristol case says funding was put before patients