Role of remediation in cases of serious misconduct before UK healthcare regulators: a qualitative study.

Background: The raison d'etre of healthcare profession regulators across the globe is to protect patients and the public from the risk of harm. In cases of serious misconduct, remediation is deemed to be an important factor when considering the risk of harm from a practitioner under investigation. Yet, we know very little about how regulators account for remediation in their decision-making, and whether it is consistent with the aim of risk reduction.

Duties of Candour in Healthcare: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth?

The creation of professional and statutory duties of candour has formalised the requirement for clinicians and healthcare organisations to be honest with patients and families when treatment has gone wrong. This article explains the background to creating both duties, analyses the concept of candour, the role of apologies, and considers evidence about compliance. It argues that making candour a statutory requirement appropriately reflects the ethical imperative of telling the truth about harm and is a powerful signal for honesty.

Empathizing and Sympathizing With Robots: Implications for Moral Standing.

This paper discusses the ethical nature of empathetic and sympathetic engagement with social robots, ultimately arguing that an entity which is engaged with through empathy or sympathy is engaged with as an "experiencing Other" and is as such due at least "minimal" moral consideration. Additionally, it is argued that extant HRI research often fails to recognize the complexity of empathy and sympathy, such that the two concepts are frequently treated as synonymous. The arguments for these claims occur in two steps.

Artificial intelligence interventions focused on opioid use disorders: A review of the gray literature.

Background: With the artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm shift comes momentum toward the development and scale-up of novel AI interventions to aid in opioid use disorder (OUD) care, in the identification of overdose risk, and in the reversal of overdose.

Objective: As OUD-specific AI interventions are relatively recent, dynamic, and may not yet be captured in the peer-reviewed literature, we conducted a review of the gray literature to identify literature pertaining to OUD-specific AI interventions being developed, implemented and evaluated.

Methods: Gray literature databases, customized Google searches, and targeted websites were searched from January 2013 to October 2019.

Leaving patients to their own devices? Smart technology, safety and therapeutic relationships.

Background: This debate article explores how smart technologies may create a double-edged sword for patient safety and effective therapeutic relationships. Increasing utilization of health monitoring devices by patients will likely become an important aspect of self-care and preventive medicine. It may also help to enhance accurate symptom reports, diagnoses, and prompt referral to specialist care where appropriate.

Expert evidence and medical manslaughter: vagueness in action.

This article examines the reliance placed on expert evidence in prosecutions of health professionals for gross negligence manslaughter, where juries must decide whether conduct goes beyond civil negligence and constitutes the crime of involuntary manslaughter. It argues that the test for liability is vague and examines some of the consequences of this. Given the vagueness of the offence, jurors are likely to place great reliance on expert medical evidence.

Trust in the context of patient safety problems.

Purpose: This paper considers some implications of recent developments relating to patient safety for understandings of trust in health care contexts.

Design/methodology/approach: Conceptual analysis focusing on patients' trust in health care providers and health care providers' trust in patients.

Findings: Growing awareness of the scale of the problem of iatrogenic harm has prompted concerns that patients' trust in health care providers may be threatened and/or become inappropriate or dysfunctional.