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MPS welcomes essential incident and complaint guidance for healthcare professionals
Medical Protection Society (MPS) has welcomed the publication of two pieces of essential guidance from the Department of Health, providing healthcare professionals with timely advice on the important topics of incident reporting and complaints procedures.
The ‘National Guideline for ‘Patient Safety Incident Reporting and Learning in the Health Sector of South Africa’ and ‘National Guideline to Manage Complaints, Compliments and Suggestions in the Health Sector of South Africa’ have each been recently published by the Department, and provide an update to existing guidance.
Responding to the updated guidance, Dr Graham Howarth, Head of Medical Services – Africa at MPS said: “We welcome the Department of Health’s decision to update its guidance on incident reporting as well as complaints procedures, and they both provide an excellent overview for healthcare professionals of the processes involved.
“Healthcare professionals want to provide the very best for their patients. However, as with any form of human endeavour, both incidents and complaints are inevitable. “It is important that where incidents happen, they are identified early so that appropriate reporting and learning happens, helping to reduce the chance of such incidents being repeated. MPS is pleased that healthcare professionals now have further updated guidance from the Department on how to manage and learn from incidents, and thus improve patient safety.
“Likewise, MPS has called for a comprehensive complaints process for many years, and we are pleased to see this is being further refined. Processing complaints in a timely and professional manner is of paramount importance both for mitigating litigation, and for improving the patient experience.
“If MPS members are in doubt about incident reporting, or the managing of complaints, they can contact us for advice.”
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About MPS
The Medical Protection Society Limited (“MPS”) is the world’s leading protection organisation for doctors, dentists and healthcare professionals. We protect and support the professional interests of more than 300,000 members around the world. Membership provides access to expert advice and support and can also provide, depending on the type of membership required, the right to request indemnity for any complaints or claims arising from professional practice.
Our in-house experts assist with the wide range of legal and ethical problems that arise from professional practice. This can include clinical negligence claims, complaints, medical and dental council inquiries, legal and ethical dilemmas, disciplinary procedures, inquests and fatal accident inquiries.
Our philosophy is to support safe practice in medicine and dentistry by helping to avert problems in the first place. We do this by promoting risk management through our workshops, E-learning, clinical risk assessments, publications, conferences, lectures and presentations.
MPS is not an insurance company. All the benefits of membership of MPS are discretionary as set out in the Memorandum and Articles of Association.
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