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Found 570 results
  1. News Article
    A 48-hour strike by nurses in England over the Bank Holiday weekend will be cut short by a day after a High Court judge ruled it was partly unlawful. The walkout in a row over pay by the Royal College of Nursing, due to start on Sunday, will now end on Monday. RCN chief Pat Cullen said this was "the darkest day" of the dispute so far and the government needed to negotiate. Downing Street said it was "regrettable" the government had to go to court and it had tried to avoid it. Health Secretary Steve Barclay took legal action after NHS Employers said the last day of the planned strike was not covered by the mandate as the ballots closed on 2 November at midday. The judge Mr Justice Linden ordered the RCN to pay the costs of the hearing, saying the union had showed "a high degree of unreasonableness", the outcome was "inevitable" and "instead of grasping the nettle and conceding" it had forced the case to court. Read full story Source: BBC News, 27 April 2023
  2. News Article
    Health Secretary Steve Barclay is to ask judges to rule whether part of the next nurse strike is unlawful. The government wants the High Court to assess whether Tuesday - the last day of the walkout in England - falls outside the Royal College of Nursing's six-month mandate for action. It believes the mandate will have lapsed by Tuesday - the 48-hour strike is due to start at 20:00 BST on Sunday. The RCN accused ministers of using "draconian anti-union legislation". Mr Barclay's decision to take legal action follows a request from hospital bosses. The RCN argues the strike falls within the required six-month period from when votes were cast in its ballot for industrial action. But NHS Employers said it had legal advice that the action would be unlawful. Read full story Source: BBC News, 24 April 2023
  3. News Article
    The NHS has launched a legal challenge that could end in the high court to block the second day of an upcoming strike by tens of thousands of nurses. Officials at NHS Employers wrote to the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) on Wednesday saying the union’s plans for a two-day strike were unlawful. In response, it is understood the RCN has said it will “forcibly resist” employers’ attempts to seek a high court injunction designed to block the strike, which they insist is lawful. The threat raises the possibility of a high court clash between NHS lawyers backed by the government and those of the nursing union. It also highlights the increasingly bitter relationship between the government and those representing workers on the frontline of the health service. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 20 April 2023
  4. News Article
    The US Supreme Court has extended until Friday a temporary block on limits to access of a popular abortion pill. A Texas judge suspended approval of abortion drug mifepristone on 7 April, questioning its safety. Parts of that decision were upheld on appeal, prompting the Biden administration to make an emergency request to the Supreme Court. It's the most significant such case since the Supreme Court last year ended the nationwide right to abortion. The pill - used in more than half of abortions in the US - was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) more than two decades ago. Critics say that by overriding the FDA's approval, the court in Texas has usurped the federal health agency's remit to regulate food, medicine, and medical devices. Legal experts warn the ruling opens the door for challenges to other approved medicines in the US and could also stifle development of future drugs. Read full story Source: BBC News, 20 April 2023
  5. News Article
    A tribunal which allowed a doctor's voluntary removal from the medical register was an "unlawful corner-cutting exercise", a judge has said. Neurologist Michael Watt was at the centre of Northern Ireland's biggest recall of patients. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) allowed him to voluntarily remove himself in 2021. It meant he would not face a public hearing about any fitness to practice issues. More 2,500 patients who were in his care had their cases reviewed - with around one in five having their diagnosis changed. Having already quashed the decision to grant removal, Mr Justice McAlinden delivered a scathing assessment of how the application was handled on Monday. In Belfast's High Court, he described the process where Dr Watt's request was heard without the necessary jurisdiction as a "fiasco". The court also heard how Dr Watt appeared to have a "get out of jail free card" where patients were denied public scrutiny of their medical care. Read full story Source: BBC News, 17 April 2023
  6. News Article
    The deaths of 650 patients treated by a breast cancer surgeon who was convicted of maiming hundreds are being investigated, it has been reported. Once one of the country’s leading doctors, Ian Paterson carried out thousands of operations before he was jailed for uneccesarily performing hundreds of life-changing surgeries. The Sunday Times has now revealed medical experts are sifting through the records of women who were cared for by the disgraced surgeon over more than twenty years. He is currently serving a 20-year jail term, having been found guilty of 17 counts of wounding with intent. Many of the procedures, which took place between 1997 and 2011, had “no medically justifiable reason”, a court heard. According to The Sunday Times, 27 inquests have been opened in cases where coroners “believe there is evidence to have reason to suspect that some of those deaths may be unnatural”. Read full story Source: The Independent, 16 April 2023
  7. News Article
    The government is actively considering whether to give full legal powers to an independent inquiry investigating the deaths of mental health patients. Roughly 2,000 deaths at the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) are being examined. The BBC understands Conservative Health Secretary Stephen Barclay is minded to make the inquiry statutory, which would compel witnesses to come forward. Only 11 current and former trust staff have agreed to give live evidence. Melanie Leahy, whose son Matthew died aged 20 while an inpatient at the Linden Centre in Chelmsford, said families were "definitely" a step closer to what they had campaigned for. "We just need it converted [to a statutory inquiry] - it's just delay after delay after delay and we need those powers," she told BBC Essex. Read full story Source: BBC News, 3 April 2023
  8. News Article
    A law firm that routinely advises health service bosses faces claims it withheld evidence in a landmark NHS whistleblowing case. A judge has called for full evidence disclosure to assess claims that healthcare specialist firm Hill Dickinson acted fraudulently in a dispute over a lack of legal protection for NHS doctors in whistleblowing claims. The firm will now have to account for its actions in litigation that saw more than 50,000 doctors below consultant level in England deprived of legal whistleblowing protections, according to the junior medic at the centre of it, Chris Day. The case also had implications for 865,000 agency workers across other sectors – including construction. Read full story Source: ByLine Times, 9 February 2023
  9. News Article
    A review of the whistleblowing framework – the laws that support workers who blow the whistle on wrongdoing in the workplace – has been launched by the Government. The review will seek views and evidence from whistleblowers, key charities, employers and regulators. Whistleblowing refers to when a worker makes a disclosure of information which they reasonably believe shows wrongdoing or someone covering up wrongdoing. Workers who blow the whistle are entitled to protections, which were introduced through the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (PIDA). Successive governments have taken steps to strengthen whistleblowing policy and practice. It provides a route for employees to report unsafe working conditions and wrongdoing across all sectors. This was keenly felt during the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic, when the Care Quality Commission and Health and Safety Executive recorded sharp increases in the number of whistleblowing disclosures they received. The review will gather evidence on the effectiveness of the current regime in enabling workers to speak up about wrongdoing and protect those who do so. The evidence gathering stage of the review will conclude in Autumn 2023. Read full press release Source: Gov.UK, 27 March 2023
  10. News Article
    People dying in the UK face “uncontrollable” pain and “unbearable suffering”, which palliative care alone cannot fix, according to the first evidence to a major new parliamentary inquiry asking if assisted dying should finally be legalised. In a shocking submission in favour of a law change, Molly Meacher told the Commons health and social care committee that the reality of end of life could include vomiting faeces, endless nausea and decaying tumours that smelled so bad they drove people out of hospital wards. People “are existing, they’re not living”, the crossbench peer and chair of the charity Dignity in Dying told the committee inquiry, which comes eight years after the House of Commons last considered changing legislation in 2015. Arguing strongly against any law change, Ilora Finlay, a crossbench peer and palliative care physician warned of the risk of “elder abuse” being worsened by a law change and said wider availability of palliative care, which remains patchy in the UK, must instead be a priority. Charles Falconer, a Labour peer and former Lord Chancellor, described the current situation, where dying people sometimes withdraw their own treatment rather than taking drugs to end their life, as “a mess”. He proposed that assisted dying should be available only to terminally ill people and not those facing “unbearable suffering”, as others have suggested. A diagnosis would be needed from two doctors plus approval from high court judge. “The bills that have been proposed [previously but defeated] say the person who decides to have an assisted death must have the capacity to make that decision,” he said. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 28 March 2023
  11. News Article
    The high-profile Australian neurosurgeon Charlie Teo admits making an error by going “too far” and damaging a patient, but maintains she was told of the risks. The doctor on Monday appeared at a medical disciplinary hearing to explain how two women patients ended up with catastrophic brain injuries. Teo also defended allegations that he acted inappropriately by slapping a patient in an attempt to rouse her after surgery, contrasting it with Will Smith’s notorious slap of Chris Rock at the Academy Awards last year. “It wakes them up and it wakes them up pretty quickly. And I will continue to do it.” Charlie Teo tells inquiry he ‘did the wrong thing’ in surgery that left patient in vegetative state One of the issues the panel of legal and medical experts is considering is whether the women and their families were adequately informed of the risks of surgery. Both women had terminal brain tumours and had been given from weeks to months to live. They were left in essentially vegetative states after the surgeries and died soon after. “We were told he could give us more time,” one of the husbands said, according to court documents. “There was never any information about not coming out of it". Read full story Source: The Guardian, 27 March 2023
  12. News Article
    The UK is supposed to have one of the best systems in the world for preventing vulnerable people being exploited for their organs. How then did one of its biggest hospitals become embroiled in the macabre trade of kidney harvesting? The UK’s first trial organ trafficking trial has exposed alarming vulnerabilities to a illegal trade that makes up 10% of transplants worldwide. The case has highlighted how poverty can tempt some people to sell their body parts to those willing to exploit an acute global shortage of organs for donation. The case heard that doctors at a private renal unit at London’s Royal Free hospital and the regulators, the Human Tissue Authority (HTA), were fooled by Dr Obinna Obeta, into approving his kidney transplant in July 2021. As the prosecutor, Hugh Davies, said: “If there’s a lesson to be learned here – those clinicians need to set the index of suspicion for safeguarding somewhat lower.” Dominique Martin, a professor of health ethics at Australia’s Deakin University who studies organ trafficking, said the case highlighted the need for robust vetting by hospitals and regulators. She said: “There is a level of complacency, including in the UK, the US and Australia regarding the risks of organ trafficking happening within our borders. Screening programmes may not be as strong as we assume or as consistently implemented as we might expect.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 23 March 2023
  13. Content Article
    Ten years ago today, a public inquiry concluded that patients were subject to shocking levels of neglect at Stafford Hospital - putting it among the worst care scandals in NHS history. A young local reporter, Shaun Lintern – now The Sunday Times' health editor – helped expose the scandal. With the NHS again under huge pressure, can we be sure the same failings won't happen again? In this podcast, part of the Stories of our Times podcast series, Shaun speaks to the barrister who chaired the inquiry.
  14. Content Article
    In this opinion piece, Kath Sansom, founder of campaign group Sling the Mesh, looks at flaws in the Government’s approach to women harmed by pelvic mesh surgery receiving financial redress. She highlights the unsuccessful case of Sarah*, who attempted to bring a clinical negligence case after suffering multiple complications as a result of pelvic mesh, to demonstrate that the national Redress Agency recommended by the Cumberlege Review is still very necessary.
  15. Content Article
    Linda Millband is the national practice lead for medical negligence at Thompsons Solicitors. She led the team responsible for fighting, and winning, a legal battle on behalf of 650 ex-patients of disgraced breast surgeon Ian Paterson. Ahead of the publication of the Independent Inquiry into Ian Paterson, Linda reflects on how it should be used as a catalyst for positive change in private hospitals.
  16. Content Article
    This editorial by Barbara Fain, Chief Executive of the Betsy Lehman Center in Massachusetts, highlights the need to focus on system safety and moving away from a culture of individual blame, in order to improve patient safety. Referring to the case of nurse RaDonda Vaught who was convicted of negligent homicide for a medication error at a Tennessee hospital, Barbara looks at research that demonstrates that people generally believe the best way to reduce the likelihood of medical errors is by choosing the right doctor, and argues that this cultural belief played into Vaught's conviction. She highlights the need to use evidence-based strategies to communicate with healthcare professionals and the public about the wider picture of patient safety and systems thinking.
  17. Content Article
    A report by Lord Young of Graffham to the Prime Minister (David Cameron) following a Whitehall‑wide review of the operation of health and safety laws and the growth of the compensation culture.
  18. Content Article
    This editorial in the Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management reflects on the achievements of the organisation Action Against Medical Accidents (AvMA) over the past 40 years and looks at the emerging role of Patient Safety Learning amongst organisations working for patient safety. Helen Hughes, Chief Executive of Patient Safety Learning, and Albert Wu, Editor-in-chief of the journal, reflect on the purpose and value of patient safety charities and not-for-profit organisations, highlighting the ways in which they channel and champion the patient voice and campaign to address specific areas of recurrent harm. They discuss the vital nature of the patient perspective in driving safety improvements in healthcare, and look at how these organisations amplify this. They also talk about the role of Patient Safety Learning and what it is doing to both drive system change at policy level, and share widely the knowledge of risk and good practice for safer care. They discuss the ways in which Patient Safety Learning delivers its aim to "listen to and promote the voice of the patient safety front line - patients, families and staff.”
  19. Content Article
    This article provides an overview of the National Patient Safety Board Act of 2022; legislation which has been introduced in the USA to establish an independent federal agency dedicated to preventing and reducing healthcare-related harms.
  20. Content Article
    In this blog, journalist David Hencke shares his views on the ruling of Judge Anne Martin in the case of NHS whistleblower Dr Chris Day. He argues that Judge Martin was determined to find in favour of Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, glossing over the disclosure of the deliberate destruction of 90,000 emails and the use of false evidence by the Trust. She discredited the evidence of Dr Day’s witnesses, including the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt and two senior medical experts, on the basis that they were biased.
  21. Content Article
    In this opinion piece for the Daily Mail, journalist Tom Utley recounts his recent experience of a seven hour wait at A&E after receiving abnormal blood test results from his GP. He argues that fear of litigation is causing GPs to refer patients on to A&E unecessarily, contributing to the overcrowding happening at emergency departments. He also highlights inefficiencies in the system and states that lack of staff capacity to tell him he didn't require any treatment meant he stayed an additional hour and a half in the waiting room.
  22. Content Article
    This is a summary of a presentation given by NHS England's Lauren Mosley and Tracey Herlihey to discuss the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) to the law firm Browne Jacobsen. The session covered key elements of PSIRF, what it means for coroners, litigation and trusts. There was also feedback from an early adopter trust,
  23. Content Article
    When medical errors result in adverse patient outcomes, many healthcare professionals are concerned about malpractice litigation. Fear of malpractice has been associated with excessive health care use through defensive medicine, which involves doctors ordering additional testing or making extra referrals to protect themselves from malpractice accusations. The authors of this study in JAMA Network Open aimed to examine the perspectives of doctors on patient harm and malpractice litigation. They conducted an online survey targeting all emergency department attending physicians and advanced practice clinicians (APCs) in acute care hospitals across Massachusetts from January to September 2020. The results showed that although clinicians feared legal action, they feared harming patients to a greater degree regardless of specialty, experience or sex.
  24. News Article
    A major trust’s former chief executive and medical director have been cleared, after being accused of failing to protect breast patients from a rogue surgeon. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service has ruled neither Mark Goldman nor Ian Cunliffe’s fitness to practise was impaired, in a case brought by the General Medical Council. Mr Goldman was chief executive of the Heart of England Foundation Trust from 2001 until 2010, while Dr Cunliffe served as HEFT medical director between 2006 and 2010. Both held roles at HEFT while Ian Paterson was there. Mr Paterson was jailed for 20 years in 2017 after being convicted of 17 offences of wounding with intent while being employed at HEFT, while a later inquiry concluded he may have conducted up to 1,000 botched and unnecessary operations over a 14-year period. Mr Goldman and Dr Cunliffe are now pursuing the GMC for the costs of the case, which is expected to be heard over five days in January 2023. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 18 October 2022
  25. News Article
    The grandfather of a baby who died at a hospital that was fined over failings in the delivery has spoken of his five-year fight for justice. Derek Richford was speaking as an independent report into baby deaths at the East Kent Hospitals Trust will be released this week. He said he "came up against a brick wall" while searching for answers over the death of grandson Harry Richford. An inquest into Harry's death at Margate's Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in 2017 found it was wholly avoidable and contributed to by neglect. Coroner Christopher Sutton-Mattocks said the inquest, which was finally held in 2020, was only ordered due to the family's persistence. The following year the trust was fined £733,000 after admitting failing to provide safe care and treatment for mother Sarah Richford and her son following a prosecution by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Mr Richford said: "To start with we felt fairly alone and we felt like we were coming up against a brick wall. "The trust were refusing at that time to call the coroner. They were reporting Harry's death as 'expected'. "We didn't contact anyone other than the CQC just to say 'look there's been a problem here'." He said at a meeting with the trust, more than five months later, "we suddenly realised that there were a huge [number] of errors". Mr Richford told the BBC: "It took me about a year to come up with all the detail I needed and to speak to all the right people." He said the family then spoke to the Health Safety Investigation Branch who found there were issues. Mr Richford also tracked down a "damming" report by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). "In the end it was like peeling back the layers of an onion, and the more you took off, the more you found," he said. Read full story Source: BBC News, 18 October 2022
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