I know some good solicitors and much credit to them.  Trefor you have
experience across the professional boundaries.  Lawyers (albeit elected)
now run the country, they try and run social services, do they improve
things when they get involved?  As a fairly serious point, and as
believer in justice and the rule of law, how can the regulation of
medicine be made better?  Is the sacrifice of innocent, or at least just
humanly fallible doctors, a reasonable price to pay?

Julian


No, not by lawyers, and definitely no!

Lawyers often feel that the legislature is interfering with the running
of their day to day expert practice as much as we do. My brother and
sister in law are involved in child care cases (she is a senior social
worker) and they were complaining this weekend about the fact that
expertise is questioned and argued against as if it were a simple matter
of fact in every case, not a matter of expert opinion.

The aphorism that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one
innocent be imprisoned should apply to Doctors mistakes, albeit along
the lines of "better than 10 cockups be excused than one victim of
circumstance be struck off".

We do need regulation and we do need to be policed, but the complexity
of many of the cases is lost in the simplification process that is done
for the best of reasons to allow lay people to be involved.

Experts should still be allowed to say what they think and their opinion
should carry much more weight than the lay person who does not
understand the complexities and stresses of clinical practice. The
independent advice should include non medical clinical staff much more
such as nurses, midwives, physios etc.

Trefor