BMJ 2008;336:741 (5 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.39537.847523.C2
News
New law puts NHS trusts at risk of charges of corporate manslaughter
Clare Dyer
1 BMJ
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
NHS trusts will face the risk of prosecutions for corporate manslaughter if patients die as a result of gross negligence, under a new law coming into force this week.
The change could mean fewer prosecutions of individual doctors for manslaughter, as prosecutors turn their attention to systemic failures of organisations instead.
The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 covers the whole of the United Kingdom (homicide is the term used in Scotland). For a prosecution to succeed, management failures must amount to a gross breach of the duty of care—in other words, the conduct that breaches the duty of care must fall far below what could reasonably have been expected.
The act comes after years of lobbying for a statutory offence of corporate manslaughter, mainly in the light of rail disasters and injuries and deaths on construction sites. Under the common law, successful prosecutions against large organisations were doomed
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