Duty of candour – what it means to you

Duty of candour means NHS organisations have a legal duty to inform and apologise to patients if mistakes have been made in the delivery of their care or treatment, or where moderate or severe harm has been caused.

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Duty of candour means NHS organisations have a legal duty to inform and apologise to patients if mistakes have been made in the delivery of their care or treatment, or where moderate or severe harm has been caused.

In such incidents, the Trust must provide a verbal and written explanation and apology and this must be recorded on Datix (the Trust’s incident reporting system).  All NHS provider bodies registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) must comply with this statutory duty of candour.

All staff must be aware of the Duty of Candour and what it means for them in practice.

ULHT’s approach to candour demonstrates a commitment to providing high quality care for our patients, even when things go wrong. Our staff are committed to ensuring that patients are fully involved in their care, that they are communicated with if there are issues and that any problems are fully investigated.

By understanding the root causes that lead to an incident, and sharing lessons learnt we can help to ensure that similar incidents do not happen again. This is both good practice, and gives our patients confidence that we are a learning organisation.