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Modernising professional regulation: Responses to the Shipman Inquiries, Including Kerr/Haslam, Neale and Ayling Inquiries

Alongside the White Paper, we have also published on 21st February 2007 the Government’s response to the Fifth Report of the Shipman Inquiry, Safeguarding Patients, which sets out a wide-ranging plan of action to put in place new safeguards for society, building on and strengthening existing clinical governance processes. It also addresses the recommendations of the inquiries into the conduct of Richard Neale, Clifford Ayling, Michael Haslam and William Kerr.

Some of the key changes include:

• better support for patients who want to register concerns and measures to ensure they are taken seriously;
• making more systematic use of information about the clinical outcomes of individual practitioners and teams;
• ensuring that information from different sources is brought together so that a fuller picture about professionals is properly considered; and
• requiring all primary care organisations to adopt best practice in investigating and acting on concerns.
  

In addition to this, the Department of Health also published on the same day an overview of the Government’s proposals and actions in relation to all the recommendations in the six reports of the Shipman Inquiry, Learning from tragedy, keeping patients safe.

• Learning from tragedy keeping patients safe