The duty of candour applies to you and your employer

Contemporary ambulance services are providing and treating more and more people with more and more complex conditions outside hospitals with an increasing number of staff with an enhanced scope of practice. It could be suggested that there will be more opportunity for a duty of candour to apply.

A catch phrase, a buzz word, that has very quickly become popular within and without the health service is ‘duty of candour’. The Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Health, the investigative senior lawyer Sir Robert Francis and others have been using it to describe how employees of the NHS should start behaving. The nearly 300 ‘do this’ recommendations emanating from the Francis Report (The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry, 2013) are replete with a need to be open and transparent.

The Berwick Report (The National Advisory Group on the Safety of Patients in England, 2013) that followed soon after was in essence a rehash of the sterling work carried out and published by Sir Robert Francis. This report called for the need of a culture of transparency and learning in order to eradicate mistakes, more openness and transparency in the service, reinforcing the need for candour. The issue of how this ‘new’ culture was to be realised was not raised by Berwick, instead this was left up to the Government as to how this could be achieved. The Government has planned a range of measures to strengthen the values of openness and transparency. In the case of the most serious failings in candour, sanctions will be imposed possibly through fines, criminal sanctions along with reputational damage.