Why should I say
John Dudgeon– GP and medical adviser with the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman – calls for a culture change in attitude among doctors towards saying sorry
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ORRY might seem to be the hardest word but for doctors it shouldn’t be. Te Scottish Public Services
Ombudsman (SPSO), the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, the NHS Litigation Authority and the General Medical Council all advise on when and how doctors should apologise. Te language they use is unsurprisingly formal. I wonder, though, how much resonance their advice has with doctors on the frontline in the UK today. For me the questions surrounding the importance of sometimes saying sorry are simple: what sort of doctors do we want to be and how do we want our patients to perceive us?
What complainants want When something goes wrong or patients think something has gone wrong they want to know that their doctor still cares and understands their concerns. Tey want honesty and responsibility. Tey want to know someone is prepared to vindicate their understanding of the error and ensure the same thing will not happen again. Tat is not to say that we should accept blame when the error is not ours but, even in a no-fault situation, patients still expect their doctor to empathise. My hope is that doctors in the UK care about their patients (especially when things go wrong),
always act with integrity and have the professionalism to shoulder blame when it is theirs to take. It would be naive to think this is always the
case. Indeed some evidence suggests that doctors avoid apologising up to 75 per cent of the time. Mindful of scandals like Mid Staffordshire, I find it worrying that as a profession we keep these barriers up. Doctors have traditionally been the most trusted individuals in their communities. Te approach to mistakes – and acknowledging those mistakes with an apology – by some of our profession runs the risk of ruining this. Former SPSO Professor Alice Brown has
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