BMJ 1998;316:1736 ( 6 June )

Education and debate

    Five times: coincidence or something more serious?
    What should a junior doctor have done?
    You cannot expect people to be heroes
    Put out the fire or risk an inferno
    Present system of whistleblowing is unsatisfactory

Five times: coincidence or something more serious?

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The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The anonymous article below was sent to us by a doctor outlining the concerns he had about the competence of a surgeon he once worked with when he was a junior doctor. We asked four other doctors what the junior should have done, what they would have done had they been approached by the junior, and what the implications are for the regulation of medicine.

Perioperative mortality (death within 28 days of an operation) has became a key surgical phrase in the past decade, particularly after the publication of the first report of the confidential inquiry into perioperative deaths. This document detailed a variety of surgical and anaesthetic disasters, and, although it pointed out that many perioperative deaths were and remain unavoidable, there were contributory factors such as inadequate hospital facilities, poor supervision of junior doctors, and inappropriate surgery in severely ill patients.

This and subsequent reports, together with regular intradepartmental . . . [Full text of this article]

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