Darren Tamplin
I have both a keen professional and personal interest in patient safety issues. I am a solicitor and partner at Kent law firm, Fairweathers, and work almost exclusively on clinical negligence claims. My firm only acts for patients / claimants in such actions. I have been representing the victims of medical accidents in Kent, nationally and internationally for over 5 years. Much of my work is concerned with establishing what went wrong and why. Many of my clients’ primary drivers in seeking specialist legal assistance is to attempt to ensure that others do not suffer the same mistakes; to ensure that organisations and individual medics do not repeat mistakes. I believe that my experience in assisting patients when things have gone wrong provides me with both broad yet detailed insight into patient safety issues and what can be the devastating consequences of medical errors.
In the area of ‘quality management’, I was responsible for devising, establishing and monitoring various systems and procedures to facilitate my firm achieving 2 externally assessed practice management standards in January of this year: Lexcel and ISO 9001. My firm was the first in the country to achieve the latest version (v.4) of the Lexcel Standard of Law Society.
In personal terms, I am pursuing an action myself in respect of a procedure that I underwent without giving my informed consent. This is an area of special interest to me. Already unwell patients, in a strange environment, with all sorts of fears and concerns need to be treated as individuals and receive tailored advice and information. In order to maintain patient autonomy, the process of obtaining consent must be given due thought, care and time by medics and not be seen as simply one of a number of boxes to be ticked pre-procedure.
In addition to consent issues, I am also very interested in the management of psychological sequelae of medical mistakes. In my experience, very few patients suffering the physiological consequences of medical errors escape without some attendant psychological harm which, amongst other things, leads to an even greater sense of loss of trust and confidence in medics and medical service organisations. I am keen to work with others to develop strategies and systems to reduce this additional element of harm.