BMJ 1998;316:1917-1918 ( 27 June )

Editorials

All changed, changed utterly

British medicine will be transformed by the Bristol case

News p 1924Letters p 1986

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

"The Bristol case," in which judgment was passed last week¹ will probably prove much more important to the future of health care in Britain than the reforms suggested in the white papers. Reorganisations of the NHS come round with monotonous regularity, but changes on the wards and in surgeries are slow and often unrelated to the passing political rhetoric. ^{2 3} In contrast, the Bristol case is a once in a lifetime drama that has held the attention of doctors and patients in a way that a white paper can never hope to match. The case has thrown up a long list of important issues (see box) that British medicine will take years to address. At the heart of the tragedy, which has been Shakespearean in its scale and structure, is, as the GMC said, "the trust that patients place in their doctors." That trust will never be the same again, but . . . [Full text of this article]

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Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

A failure of action, not of detection.

James Willis
bmj.com, 2 Jul 1998 [Full text]

Quality assessment by registrars - first hand, in depth, accurate and resource effective

G Jayakrishna Menon
bmj.com, 16 Jun 1999 [Full text]

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