In response to recommendations about candour, openness and transparency in the Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry, the Secretary of State for Health asked us for advice on how professional regulation could encourage professionals to be more candid when healthcare or social work goes wrong.
Why did we we produce this report?
In response to recommendations about candour, openness and transparency in the Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry, the Secretary of State for Health asked us for advice on how professional regulation could encourage professionals to be more candid when healthcare or social work goes wrong.
What is the report about?
The resulting report identifies a number of areas where professional regulation could be improved to encourage more candour and advises the Secretary of State in respect of these.
Published alongside this is a supporting literature review which explores the factors that encourage and discourage health professionals and social workers from disclosing mistakes and reporting safety concerns and considers what this could mean for professional regulation.
The themes of openness, transparency and candour are at the core of the Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (the Francis Report). The Francis Report’s recommendations in this area reflect both a need to be open with patients as a matter of course throughout healthcare treatment, and a specific need to be candid when harm has occurred. They also address the current disaggregated and independent approaches to the principles of openness, transparency and candour. The Francis Report’s recommendations are wide-ranging, and draw on a number of levers to influence behaviour and encourage more widespread and active demonstration of openness, transparency and candour. A statutory duty of candour on service providers and employed professionals is one of the levers the Francis Report recommends. Other recommendations rely on professional obligations and role-based commitments, such as those in the NHS Constitution.
In its initial response to the Francis Report, the Government committed to working with the professional regulators to understand what more could be done to encourage healthcare professionals to be candid with patients. It is essentially this question which we have explored in this paper, although, given our remit, it has been broadened to include social workers in England being candid with people who use social work services.