The chair of the BMA council, Mark Porter, told a conference on whistleblowing on 3 October that some of the risks faced by patients in hospitals were caused by the working environment and culture within the NHS rather than the fact that providing healthcare is itself 'inherently risky'.
He said that there would continue to be poor care and avoidable patient-safety incidents "...as long as the culture of quality and safety is not fully embedded into our service from the top to the bottom and, as importantly, back again from the bottom to the top.
"We are engaged in a business that needs urgently to reform itself and to move from the victimisation of those with a conscience, to their celebration."
Nearly one third of cancers in the over 70s are diagnosed following emergency admission to hospital, according to new research by the National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN) and published on 21 September in the British Journal of Cancer.
In what has been described as a "phenomenal" contribution to the London 2012 legacy, the Games' anti-doping facilities, provided by GlaxoSmithKline at its Harlow base, will be developed after the Olympic and Paralympic Games into a world-class resource that could help revolutionise healthcare. The MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre will use the cutting edge facilities developed for London 2012 to help develop better and more targeted treatment for patients. The centre, the first of its kind in the world, will enable researchers to explore the characteristics of disease in order to develop new drugs and treatments for patients.
The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) has called on the Government to legally protect the job title 'surgeon', so only those who have qualified as a medical doctor and undertaken post-graduate surgical training can use the title. The call follows publication of a survey for its patient group, which found that 95% of adults in Great Britain would expect an individual using the job title 'surgeon' to have a medical degree.