The way the media portrays medical stories is beginning to annoy me (I say beginning, well maybe it is just annoying me more than before). Every week there is at least one tale a of medical or nursing accident / mistake / willfull lack of care; call it what you will, played out in the full view of the TV or written media and often both. Most week’s those of us working in the NHS are told we are fully responsible for people dying from MRSA in our hospitals because a) we don’t wash our hands and b) we don’t clean our hospitals well enough. Both of these may be true, but actually there are other contributing factors like the consumption of antibiotics which has led to increased resistance to bacterial infection and to the fact that many of us are walking around with Staph Aureus up our noses and don’t know it.

This week I was upset to see a teenager who is suffering from cancer being paraded on TV with her parents because she has suffered from a medical mistake. Firstly I am extremely upset that health care professional colleagues have miscalculated her radiotherapy treatment and over dosed her causing her visible side effects and untold damage. However I am also concerned about the way the health professionals are being held up to the pillory of the media in this way. It seems that we are less likely to sue our doctors than desire to parade them on TV and make them publicly apologise for what they have done. I am not wishing to belittle what has happened to this poor girl but merely point out that the way we are reporting such events is nothing short of obscene.

One of the things which has been happening in the health service since 1997 has been that we have been much more ready to examine our mistakes and look at how these can be prevented in the future. We are encouraged to report incidents and near misses, which occur within our areas of clinical practice so that we and others can learn from them. The trouble is that we have enough of a blame culture internally to prevent real learning from taking place, without having a BBC news team camping outside our doors whenever an incident occurs. It is no longer enough to say sorry and no longer enough to receive financial compensation, people want someone’s head. Next they will be sticking them up on poles infront of the hospital entrance, or will that just add to the MRSA problem?