Medics told: Use your first names

DOCTORS and nurses should refer to each other by their first names in an effort to cut down on patient deaths, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said yesterday.

‘In the UK we are still very hierarchical in medicine. It’s one of the only professions where we are talking about “Mr this” and “Dr that” rather than first-name terms,’ he said.

‘In an operating theatre, if you have a hierarchy, you only have one pair of eyes spotting a mistake, whereas if you remove the hierarchy you can have eight or nine pairs of eyes spotting those potentially lethal mistakes.’

He added that the current system makes it ‘practically impossible’ for doctors and nurses to be completely honest about their conduct.

He was speaking at the World Patient Safety Summit in London where he announced plans to bring 2,000 pharmacists into GP surgeries in order to catch prescription errors.

The move comes as research commissioned by the health department highlighted how more than 200million medication errors are made in the NHS every year.

The mistakes could contribute to up to 22,000 deaths annually in England.