Patient safety and clinical negligence: the importance of looking back

There is a danger of being too rooted in the past when it comes to policy making in any field. This can lead to a resistance to change and organisational values not being refreshed. We need to move with the times but also to reflect on our core values and maintain those that are good – it is a difficult balance to maintain. History can provide us, through reports into past patient safety crises and clinical negligence reforms, with valuable insights and lessons that we can apply today in policy developments in these areas. Seminal reports can also play a pivotal role as resources for education and training programmes, such as the NHS Patient Safety Syllabus (Spurgeon and Cross, 2022). They provide essential context to discussions along with useful case study material.

To illustrate the benefit of a historical analysis I will draw on three seminal reports. Today, these reports can be seen as ‘hidden gems’. They do appear in some contemporary reports but, in my view, are not as well-known as they should be. They present a timeless view of our NHS quality and governance framework, including clinical negligence litigation, which deserves to be much more widely shared.