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NHS Redress Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 22:"Page 3, line 14, at end insert—" ““(   )   There shall be a duty upon scheme members to inform a patient when a mistake has been made.”” The noble Baroness said: In moving Amendment No. 22, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 28. The amendment seeks to encapsulate what the Minister has been telling us is very important in changing the culture of the NHS—which was very much the point of the Chief Medical Officer’s Making Amends. If, as we understand, the whole purpose of this is to get to a stage where those working in the NHS are open and transparent about what goes on, when something goes wrong not only should members of a scheme be able to initiate an investigation, but they ought to inform patients when a mistake has been made that it is the sort of thing that they might wish to investigate. The fact that that is not in the Bill leads one to feel that this is still more being led by the NHS than by the patients. I took the Minister seriously when he said that he wanted the patient to be central to this and driving the way in which the investigation and redress system worked. If that is the case, it seems to me that it is essential that the patient should be told when a member of the scheme—an NHS body—discovers that a mistake has been made, even when the patient himself may not have realised that a mistake has been made because he does not have the necessary expertise. I beg to move.