Sensible and sane reforms to improve patient safety

Health Minister Leo Varadkar announced yesterday a range of measures to improve patient safety. They include a simplified complaints procedure which is a very welcome change.

The current process of making a complaint against a doctor or other medical professional is a tortuous and convoluted one, giving rise to the suspicion that some hospital management use it to exhaust complainers into giving up.

In fact, the opposite often happens, with patients spurred on by such obfuscation to take their complaint to the courts, thereby giving rise to substantial legal costs that might otherwise have been avoided.