Call for stricter monitoring of doctors
Failure to deal with recognised problems about a doctor’s work has been a recurring historical theme, a defence body medical director warned the summit.
Rob Hendry
Dr Rob Hendry, of Medical Protection, reflected: ‘One of the tragedies I have seen over the years is when things have gone wrong and you go in to speak to individuals and organisations, the number of times people say: “Yeah, we knew it was a disaster waiting to happen”.’
He believed the sector had not been good enough at picking up risk indicators. But now there was very strong research evidence that it was possible to predict those who were going to run into problems before the claims or the regulator came in.
Dr Hendry looked forward to ‘more sophisticated use of data’ and having the indemnity/insurance provider as part of the team looking at this, and subtle indicators that something was not right.
He hoped a positive side-effect of this type of management would help reduce the cost of premiums alongside risk.
His comments were made during a session entitled ‘Falling between the cracks – regulation and risk in new consultant business models’.
Dr Nigel Acheson, Care Quality Commission (CQC) deputy chief inspector of hospitals, said it was sad as a clinician to see cases where just a bit of forward planning could have helped when a situation deteriorated.
But too often it was like Groundhog Day with time delays and nobody seeming to know what to do.
He said many doctors naively thought their work was just about running the clinical service and forgot there were regulations and expectations covering the business. The CQC had also found providers who failed to fully understand their obligations.
But he was pleased to see much more openness and transparency between the regulator CQC and stakeholder groups and providers.
Regulatory lawyer Carlton Sadler, of Bevan Brittan, warned that providers would increasingly have ‘to up their game’.
He had seen the CQC telling providers they should have acted after a consultant’s second operation mishap, rather than the third.
There was potential scope for the regulator to say: ‘If you’d been discharging your regulatory responsibilities properly, you would have avoided that third incidence of harm and therefore we are going to hold your hospital accountable for that.’