News archive

Reading the signals – will it be different this time?

‘Blaming the problem on frontline staff – something we at AvMA still see – is not good enough.’

Dear NHS, Happy 75 Birthday

We at AvMA write to wish you a happy birthday. Well done for making it to this grand age; what an achievement. We doubt that many alive in 1948, the year of your birth, will have believed for one moment that you would have survived so many ups and downs, funding squeezes and political interferences (not all helpful), and made it to 75. 

Broken trust: making patient safety more than just a promise.

AvMA welcomes and endorses the recommendations made today by England’s Health Ombudsman in their report, ‘Broken trust: making patient safety more than just a promise’.

What price justice?

As a country, we pride ourselves in having an underpinning rule of law that supports our famously unwritten constitution. The rule of law is the concept of a framework and set of practices and institutions that underpins a fair society where public bodies are bound by accountable pre-existing, clear and known laws, and we, as citizens, are in-turn treated equally before those laws.

But I wonder how well the rule of law really holds water when we look at it through the lens of the harmed patients who have the need financially – alongside the right morally – to litigate for the clinical negligence and related harm that they encountered.