In the patient safety module I teach my Year 2 medical students I spend a lot of time on whistleblowing and speaking up. I explain why its important. The need medicine has as a profession to learn from mistakes and improve healthcare. I go over the mechanisms for speaking up and whistleblowing.
The Freedom to Speak Up Guardians introduced across trusts in 2016, after the horrors of the Mid-Staffs scandal, to ensure that employees always have someone they can safely approach to express concerns about safety or practice they have witnessed.
I’m even down with the kids. To show the normality of speaking up, even the humour, I read them a passage from Adam Kay’s brilliant book, ‘This Is Going To Hurt’, about a pair of wayward forceps and the importance of admitting when you, the doctor, have done wrong.
I detail in every way how the system has been designed to prevent a blame culture and protect the whistleblower. I even have my students role play speaking up about a safety incident so they learn the language, get experience with how people may be a bit defensive, angry even, when talking about mistakes made.
All of my course is designed to develop their abilities to calmly and rationally identify safety issues, bring them to the attention of someone who can solve the issues and in doing so maintain the high levels of best practice NHS patients expect and deserve.
And once I’ve done all that, I tell them how it really works.
I tell them about the archaic...
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