The NHS’s lawyers must be incentivised to help improve patient safety (HSJ, 26 March 2026)

Summary

At its best, the NHS is capable of extraordinary openness and compassion. But when things go wrong, time and again we see a shift towards defensiveness, organisational protection and, at its worst, outright dishonesty.

Despite the introduction of the Duty of Candour more than a decade ago, this problem has evidently not gone away. The recent interim report from the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation described families as “feeling that there had been a ‘cover up’ and defensiveness from NHS trusts”, including instances of medical notes being amended or redacted.

In the long term, a key enabler of cultural change would be wholesale structural reform of the litigation system. There is much to learn from no-fault compensation systems such as those implemented in Japan. But such reform will require significant legislative change. In the meantime, there are immediate steps we can and should take writes Jeremey Hunt in a commentary for the Health Service Journal.