A Duty of Care

What duty of care do you have for your patients? We talk a lot about duty. It is embedded in our daily conversations. We talk about ‘off-duty’, we enquire when staff are ‘on duty’ or on a ‘duty roster’. It has become part of our everyday vocabulary, but failing to provide a duty of care is the most common reason for doctors to be sued for negligence. The law of negligence seeks to ensure that as individuals, we are responsible for both our actions and our inactions.

Our first duty of health care is that the patient remains central to all care. This is both evident and implicit in the majority of the literature, policy documents and various governmental White Papers. However, there can be a tendency to forget, or to perhaps overlook, this fact when budgeting, managing or designing services for the very people that we are all here to care for—the patients. Occasionally, we are patients ourselves and it is often this very experience that shapes our own attitudes and beliefs.