Your challenges
Patient safety is now more important than ever. High profile cases, such as Mid Staffordshire, West London Mental Health Trust and Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, increase the pressure on you to ensure that your priority is the quality of the service you provide.
One of the cornerstones of any risk management system is investigating and understanding the cause of incidents in order to learn from them and prevent a recurrence.
However, alongside that, any serious incident will give rise to a myriad of separate processes. The incident will need to be reported to a number of organisations. Disciplinary action may be warranted. Where there has been a death, there will be a coroner’s inquest and, possibly, police or Health and Safety Executive investigations and criminal charges.
Balancing the conflicting requirements of these different investigations is always difficult.
Achieving your ambitions
The effective investigation and analysis of incidents can help you provide a better quality service, if approached in the right way. We can help your investigators to:
- Understand the theory behind risk management, and not just department policy
- Make use of investigative concepts such as root cause analysis
- Prepare useful, evidence based, reports that will not prejudice the organisation at a later date
- Understand the regulatory landscape and how to influence external regulators from the outset
When the most serious incidents occur we can also help you manage the external fallout and guide you through the many different processes that will be underway.
The strength you need
Our team has many years of experience, both inside and outside the NHS, of investigating and managing serious incidents. We understand the NHS and the policy constraints within which you work. At the same time our experience can help protect you during external investigations and in dealing with media attention.
We can provide you with a multidisciplinary team to ensure that you get advice from those with expertise, not only in healthcare law, but also criminal, health and safety and employment law arenas.
Lawyers you can trust
At Mills & Reeve, we believe that proactive management of risk, combined with effective incident investigation, can make a real difference to patient safety and prevent harm. We can help you to develop your process and train staff to achieve this.
When serious incidents do occur, we appreciate that they affect the whole organisation and cause great distress. Our approach to managing an incident helps alleviate some of that stress and gets the organisation back on track as quickly as possible.
Our team has been praised for the support we have given clients “… at every level in the organisation … [from] me as the chief executive, right through to the staff who were called to give witness statements.”
Legal 500 2009 said: "Jill Mason's team is the top choice for health: whatever you need, they will be able to help."
Legal 500 2010 said: "the response times are remarkable and the acumen and knowledge excellent."