OUTMODED systems to deal with medical staff who make mistakes are hampering efforts to improve patient safety in the NHS, a leading doctor has warned.
Dr Robert Hendry, the Medical Protection Society's (MPS) head of medical services in Scotland, said the long, drawn-out process inflicted on staff when something went wrong put others off coming forward to report errors for fear they would be put thr
ough the same experience. He said this meant that lessons could not be learnt from mistakes to stop them happening again.
Dr Hendry said the number of cases in which a doctor is disciplined by his employer that the MPS has dealt with has increased by 270 per cent in the last decade across the UK.
He described the case of one young doctor being disciplined over a "fairly minor" episode where something went wrong with the care of a patient.
"It was a classic example of system errors. There were lots of bits of the system that led to this unwanted outcome," said Dr Hendry. "The mechanisms to deal with that are really dinosaurs.
"Eight months later this doctor is still being taken through some kind of disciplinary process to punish him.
"It is going to be a blight on his record and doesn't really address anything from the patient's point of view."
Dr Hendry said in this case there were many lessons that could be learned about how the error came to happen which could be addressed in training. But that was not going to happen with the way the process was being handled.
He said: "Any of his fellow trainees who would see that happening would think, 'If anything goes wrong the last thing I'm going to do is tell anyone about it'.
"That flies in the face of the idea of a culture of openness. It flies in the face of the NHS learning from problems.
"There's still this need to punish people when things go wrong even when it's not really their fault."
Dr Hendry said doctors did still need to be held responsible when things went wrong. But he said that had to be done in an appropriate way.
Dr Hendry also said the launch of an expert group to look into the system of medical compensation, announced earlier this week, was a "huge opportunity" to start doing things differently in Scotland.
"The system is arcane. It's expensive. It's hopeless for patients. It takes ages if you want to sue for damages," he said.
Dr Hendry said many people could end up getting no compensation because of the system, and when they did, a lot went on legal fees rather than to the patient.
"I think there seems to be a will in Scotland to do things differently," he said. "We want to be involved in that debate."
But he said that Scotland should be wary of adopting exactly the same approach as New Zealand, which is often held up as an example because they operate a system of "no fault" compensation. This means while patients still have to prove they have been harmed through healthcare, they do not have to prove clinical negligence.
Last night a Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "Investigating the rare mistakes made in Scotland's health service is vital so that we can learn from them and improve care in future.
"That's why we encourage and expect staff to disclose any mistakes honestly. But it is absolutely not about punishing staff or subjecting them to lengthy proceedings."
