Call doctors by first name to save lives, says Hunt
NURSES must be allowed to address senior doctors by their first names in order to prevent fatal medical errors, Jeremy Hunt has said.
The Health Secretary said medicine’s strict hierarchy prevented junior staff speaking up if they noticed mistakes and that doing away with formality in operating theatres and other settings could be crucial to saving more lives.
He told an international conference on patient safety that health was one of the last professions yet to fully adopt the use of first names. In many hospitals, staff adhered to convention by us- ing the formal titles “doctor” and, in the case of surgeons, “mister”.
Mr Hunt said some doctors squandered the chance to improve because they were often “terrified” of admitting mistakes for fear of being struck off.
It is thought that up to 9,000 hospital deaths a year are caused by NHS failings. Mr Hunt gave the example of Elaine Bromiley, the wife of a British Airways pilot, who died when a nurse realised she needed a life-saving tracheostomy but stayed silent for fear of the surgeons. “In the operating theatre, if you’ve got a hierarchy, it means you’ve only got one pair of eyes spotting the mistake, whereas if you remove the hierarchy you can have eight or nine pairs of eyes spotting those potentially lethal mistakes,” he said.
His intervention follows the disclosure this week that NHS drug errors alone may be contributing to up to 22,000 deaths a year. The study, led by the University of York, found doctors, nurses and pharmacists between them make 237 million drug errors annually, and that one in six hospital patients fell victim to the blunders.
Mr Hunt said doctors were terrified of being struck off or fired or having their department’s reputation stained.
Some medical leaders said staff shortages were at the heart of preventable deaths. “Short staffing and severe financial pressures create an environment where it’s easier to make mistakes,” said Janet Davies, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing.