Everyone is entitled to a good doctor

Abstract

All patients want good doctors they can trust. Good doctors are competent, respectful, honest, and able to form good relationships with their patients and colleagues. Medical practice is inherently risky. The public, recognising this, believes that in a modern health service the competence and professionalism of all doctors should be a given, not an additional avoidable hazard. Some doctors find this expectation reasonable, others threatening. Good medical practice may be best achieved by professional regulation based on explicit, patient-centred professional standards embedded in medical education, registration and licensure, specialist certification and doctors' contracts. Effective professional regulation and professionalism should be an integral part of wider quality improvement and quality assurance. The advantages for patients are self-evident, but the trustworthiness, influence and good name of individual doctors and the medical profession collectively would be enhanced if together they were able to show that the house of medicine is being maintained in good order.