Regulating Healthcare Quality

The key focus of this edited U.K. text is on the legal and professional conflicts and issues that can arise from regulating health care quality. Doctors and nurses all increasingly face a number of dilemmas with regulating health quality issues such as increasing levels of complaints and litigation, scarcity of resources, under-staffing, professional discipline, clinical governance, clinical risk management, etc. This U.K. book spells out and discusses these issues, taking an academic approach, though this will be tempered with a practical focus on issues.

• Discusses ethical approaches to regulating health care quality
• Examines health care rights in the UK
• Looks at complaints procedures in the new NHS
• Presents alternatives to the present clinical negligence system
• Compares health care regulation in the US and UK

Preface. Introduction. Clinical governance: a means for improving and regulating quality. Health policy and provision: public management and its influence on regulation in England. Cost implications and ethics of health care quality regulation. Fault and blame in the NHS: review and replacement of the clinical negligence system in the UK. Creating a level playing field?: the influence of user and provider grievances in the shaping of health care policy. Disciplinary jurisdiction over the medical and other health care professions. The implications of the Human Rights Act 1998 - prioritising consent. The impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on health care in the UK. How effective is the Human Rights Act 1998 in protecting genetic information?. Tort law and medical quality: some lessons from the USA. Ethics and health care resources. Regulating quality of health care through judicial review.