The words to use
- Professional duty of candour
- The duty on every doctor and nurse to be open and honest when something goes wrong: tell the patient, apologise, offer to put matters right and explain the effects.
- Statutory duty of candour
- A separate legal duty on health and care organisations in England, from 2014 regulations, to tell and apologise to patients after a notifiable safety incident.
- Reflection
- Thinking honestly about what happened, why it matters and what you will change. A simple model: What? So what? Now what?
- Near miss
- An incident that could have caused harm but did not. Doctors still report near misses, because they show where harm could happen next.
