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Quote unquote
Each of these pages contains a selection of quotes from speeches, public announcements and published articles by the Chief Medical Officer. Although some of the quotations relate to issues which are timeless, others should be seen in the context of the time in which they were made. When quoting or reproducing, please acknowledge the source.
Medicine
"The patient who is armed with information, who wants to ask questions, sometimes difficult and awkward questions, should be seen as an asset in the process of care and not an impediment to it."
Clinical governance and quality
"Health services are striving to create the kinds of organisation where a passion for quality is instilled throughout the organisation. Where all staff have a curiosity, a drive, an enthusiasm for innovation and improvement. Where solving individual clinical problems is still vital but where seeing opportunities for better care for hundreds of patients captures the imagination of all staff."
Poor clinical performance
"Such is the current media climate that the first three questions a chief executive officer will be asked when something goes wrong is 'Who knew what?' 'When did they know?' and 'What did they do about it?'"
Management and leadership
"One of the signs of excellence in a manager is the ability to anticipate problems, not just react to them."
Ethnic minority health
"Contemporary European and American research on race, ethnicity, and health uses poorly defined labels to describe study populations. The search for accurate terminology remains controversial, for scientific and social reasons."
Good practice
“The two key elements in achieving patient safety are first a method to identify and characterise adverse outcomes of health care actions and second to put in place changes that enable learning through analysis of trends and patterns of adverse events and near misses, that reduce risk and that improve patient safety.”
Health and risk
"We do not know what the virus is that will cause pandemic 'flu. What we do know is that Mother Nature has the recipe book and its just a matter of time before she starts cooking."
Public health
"Complacency is perhaps the cardinal sin for those charged with protecting public health. Infectious diseases, once thought conquered, are always marshalling their forces ready to strike back in the face of reduced vigilance. Recent years have demonstrated the remarkable potential for nature to generate new threats particularly when major changes are taking place in the human habitat and in behaviour."
Patient safety
"You wouldn't just decide to forget about recovering the black box after an air crash. So why should it be thought so strange to want to learn from every accident in health care?"
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