Regulating Patient Safety: The End of Professional Dominance?

Description

Systematically improving patient safety is of the utmost importance, but it is also an extremely complex and challenging task. This illuminating study evaluates the role of professionalism, regulation and law in seeking to improve safety, arguing that the 'medical dominance' model is ill-suited to this aim, which instead requires a patient-centred vision of professionalism. It brings together literatures on professions, regulation and trust, while examining the different legal mechanisms for responding to patient safety events. Oliver Quick includes an examination in areas of law which have received little attention in this context, such as health and safety law, and coronial law, and contends in particular that the active involvement of patients in their own treatment is fundamental to ensuring their safety.

Oliver Quick is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in criminal law, medical law and public health law. He has published numerous articles in these fields, and is co-author of Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Nicola Lacey and Celia Wells, Cambridge, 2010). He has carried out empirical research into how UK prosecutors and experts interpret the controversial crime of 'medical manslaughter'. He obtained his Ph.D. thesis from the University of Wales, Cardiff and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Boston University and the National University of Singapore.

'In advancing a formulation of patient safety that protects both patients and professionals and, at the same time, stresses the importance of the role of professional and legal regulation, Quick espouses a pragmatic solution that can be welcomed by all those involved in healthcare. His arguments are evidence-led and persuasive, while acknowledging the practical difficulties of implementing the change he advocates.' Catherine Bowden, Medical Law Review