Abstract:
Following the publication of the report of the public inquiry into the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (centring on the deaths of patients at Stafford Hospital), the banner headline on the front page of The Times bluntly warned: ‘NHS: No one is safe’. The Francis report, painting a shocking picture of the suffering of hundreds of patients whose safety was ignored for the sake of corporate self-interest and cost control, recommends that there should be a fundamental change of culture so that there is a shared commitment to the ideal that patients and their safety should come first. While there is much to admire about Francis’ strategy in proposing a fundamental cultural change, this presentation raises the question whether, with the regulatory environment for patient safety seemingly broken, we should turn to a more technological approach to address the problem?

Speaker(s):
Professor Roger Brownsword, Professor of Law, King’s College London

Professor Roger Brownsword, who is a graduate of the London School of Economics, has been an academic lawyer for more than 40 years. Currently, he is Professor of Law at King’s College London, where he was the founding director of TELOS (a research centre that focuses on technology, ethics, law, society), an honorary professor at the University of Sheffield, and a visiting professor at Singapore Management University.

He has published more than a dozen books, including Law and the Technologies of the Twenty-First Century(co-authored with Morag Goodwin) (CUP, 2012), and has more than 200 papers in edited collections and law reviews. He has acted as a specialist adviser to the parliamentary committees of the United Kingdom dealing with stems cells and hybrid embryos. From 2004-2010, he was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics; and, currently, he is Chair of the Ethics and Governance Council of UK Biobank.