Steve Clarke

Informed Consent and Clinician Accountability: Introduction: Accountability, informed consent and clinician performance information

Every few years a rogue doctor comes to prominence in the international media. Some, like James Wisheart, the senior paediatric cardiac surgeon at the centre of the Bristol Royal Infirmary Scandal are deemed to be plainly incompetent to perform the operations that they have been undertaking. Others, like Jayant Patel, the surgeon at the centre of the recent scandal at the Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland, Australia, appear from the evidence to combine incompetence to perform operations undertaken with a willingness to place their patients in situations of unnecessary risk. The focus of the media on such sensational cases can obscure the fact that there are many less newsworthy, but nevertheless incompetent, physicians practising. According to Atul Gawande, science and technology writer for the New Yorker: