Managing the costs of clinical negligence in trusts

According to this report from the National Audit Office, the government needs to take a stronger and more integrated approach if it is to rein in the increasing cost of clinical negligence claims across the health and justice systems. It finds that over the last ten years, spending on the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts has quadrupled from £0.4 billion in 2006-07 to £1.6 billion in 2016-17, while the number of successful clinical negligence claims where damages were awarded has more than doubled, from 2,800 to 7,300.

RCP releases prescribing support for junior doctors

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has released Supporting Junior Doctors in Safe Prescribing, a new guide for supporting junior doctors when prescribing in hospitals.

The resource calls for the provision of more practical and interactive prescribing training for junior doctors to help reduce errors, as well as greater support from hospital trusts to create safer working environments for junior doctors to prescribe. It also recommends that postgraduate medical education leads work collaboratively with medication safety officers to identify opportunities to cover safe prescribing within medical education, while highlighting the need to address the safety culture around prescribing, by encouraging active efforts to learn from errors, both at an individual and system level.

Radiotherapy: learning from errors

Development of learning from radiotherapy errors: supplementary guidance. This document:

• presents the causative factor taxonomy
• presents the refinement to the radiotherapy pathway coding which includes the introduction of the safety barrier taxonomy
• provides guidance on the application of the taxonomy
• shares submission procedures for coding with radiotherapy staff and risk managers for inclusion in national analysis
• encourages local application of the taxonomies to improve local learning from radiotherapy error and near miss events (RTE)