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Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I support this amendment and urge the Government to accept it as it is written. I hope that the Government can see that this is very helpful; it fits with the points made by the Minister in his summing up in response to the previous amendment tabled by my noble friend Lady Masham about there being agreement on the importance of openness and candour in healthcare. The Minister went on to say that, "““the NHS could only call itself a world-class health service if it embraced openness wholeheartedly””.—[Official Report, 13/2/12; col. 590.]" He added that there was agreement that something needed to change. The beauty of the way in which the amendment is worded is that it distinguishes between major and minor occurrences. It emphasises the true duty of candour to disclose events that have affected a patient either medically or physically and that may have long-term effects. It does not focus in any way on anything trivial and requires the contractual duty of candour to be put into the contracts, which was exactly the content of the Minister's summing-up speech last time.