SIR – Following on from Nick Van Der Bijl’s excellent feature on security across the National Health Service in last month’s edition (‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’, SMT, August 2006,), it’s interesting to note that the consultation period on the Chief Medical Officer’s proposals for improving patient safety – entitled ‘Good Doctors, Safer Patients’ – has just begun.

We welcome proposals within that document to develop a central database in the form of a Medical Register. However, the Government will need to tread carefully if this is going to succeed.

Any new system must be workable in practice. If correctly implemented, patient safety would greatly improve, but in our experience commercial self-interest or competing organisational priorities could well undermine the Chief Medical Officer’s aims.

Each of the four enquiries referenced in the report refer back time and again to the problem of how to ensure that data which is held in a variety of different systems is always kept up-to-date. These data sources include those held by the General Medical Council.

Accessing out-of-date information could lead to the wrong decisions being made. Those decisions could have potentially catastrophic repercussions. A single source of information would allow re-licensing to become a reality, and permit governing bodies to identify anomalies in a doctor’s performance.

Stewart Hefferman Chief Operating Officer TSSI Systems

Source

SMT