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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12770

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Cave J, Dacre J.
The Competent Novice: Dealing with complaints
BMJ 2008 Feb 9; 336:(7639):326
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/336/7639/326?etoc


Abstract:

Key points

Try to give patients as much information as they want or need to allow them to navigate through the complexities of their illness and the healthcare system

If things go wrong, offer an explanation and a compassionate apology and explain how you will prevent similar incidents in the future

If a patient or relative expresses concerns about the patient’s treatment, then listen to them and answer any questions you can. If the complainant decides to make a formal complaint ask them to contact the complaints manager as soon as possible

One in 10 patients admitted to hospital in the United Kingdom experience an adverse event,1 and around half of these events are preventable. The number of complaints from National Health Service (NHS) patients is rising in the UK: the Department of Health’s Independent Complaints Advocacy Service dealt with 10 422 complaints in 2003-4 but almost 13 000 complaints in 2004-5.2

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909