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Welcome to Medical Protection’s guide to professionalism, a publication that takes a closer look at what it means to be a professional.

Why are medicolegal issues important?

Medical Protection has drawn on the experiences of other doctors and expert advice from our risk management professionals to bring you this guide to use during your foundation year.

Good medical records – whether electronic or handwritten – are essential for the continuity of care of your patients. Adequate medical records enable you or somebody else to reconstruct the essential parts of each patient contact without reference to memory. They should therefore be comprehensive enough to allow a colleague to carry on where you left off.

The regulations on NHS complaints in Wales are designed to make complaints handling open and accountable, fair and proportionate, and patient-focused. The emphasis is on resolving concerns in a timely fashion, openly and honestly, and a philosophy of “investigate once, investigate well”.

Patients who are kept informed about their condition and are involved in deciding on the appropriate treatment are more likely to comply with the treatment you suggest, and less likely to complain if things go wrong.

The medical consultation is a challenge to both doctor and patient, whether in the community or in hospital. The need for more detailed discussions with patients, along with their increasing autonomy and right to make choices in relation to their clinical care and treatment, has affected the traditional role of the doctor-patient relationship. This has made maintaining appropriate professional boundaries in the doctor-patient consultation more challenging, however, the guidance from national and regulatory bodies is clear that it is always the health professional's responsibility to do so.

This video provides some valuable lessons in diagnosis, documentation and the information that needs to be communicated to patients.

This video looks at a scenario where a patient brought a claim against three GPs in the same surgery, and how understanding the varied claims enabled us to support the doctors throughout the whole process.

A private neurosurgeon faces questions on consent, following a lumbar microdiscectomy sciatica and back pain.