A professional and legal duty to keep up to date

Keeping up to date with practice changes and developments is an intrinsic part of any health professional's role, but it presents challenges. There are numerous national and international patient safety stakeholders producing reports on a regular basis, and these stakeholders all maintain their own, sometimes conflicting, agendas. All this information needs to be carefully sifted and analysed for suitability of use within the NHS. This is a complex task given the size and complexity of NHS care delivery.

It will be impossible for any nurse or doctor to analyse everything that is relevant to their clinical practice area. They do, however, owe patients a legal duty of care and part of this will be the need to keep reasonably informed and updated. We can expect health professionals to demonstrate a reasonable, systematic regimen for keeping up to date.

There are study days, conferences, online courses, clinical information websites, blogs, online newspapers, journals, stakeholder, professional association websites and so on. All this forms part of the nurse or doctor's professional updating mix. They need to make a reasonable selection from these and others. Factors that will feed into an assessment of reasonableness will be varied and depend on the facts of the case in question. Likely considerations could be what other health professionals do regarding updating in the relevant clinical speciality, professional, employer expectations, professional revalidation requirements, level of post occupied, expectations of role, importance of topic to be updated, on, impact of topic on patient care, degree of change, where the information can be found, ease of access, speciality, general journal, and so on. These are just some initial thoughts and more considerations on how to determine reasonableness in a legal context will no doubt apply.