HALF of patient safety failings occur due to a breakdown in communication between hospitals and general practice, a GP leader has warned.

Dr Chris Williams - a joint chair of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) in Scotland - told MSPs that communication between doctors “often has deficits”.

Dr Williams was among a panel of experts giving evidence to Holyrood’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee as it scrutinises legislation to create the first ever Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland.

Dr Sandesh Gulhane, a Glasgow-based GP and Conservative member of the committee, said he had seen a patient in his surgery last week “telling me all the things that the hospital had said and done to them but I didn’t have a discharge letter to tell me anything”.

“I knew less than the patient did about their care,” said Dr Gulhane, adding that the submission by RCGP Scotland had noted that the “interface between primary and secondary care is where half of all errors and problems occur”.

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Asked to elaborate on this point, Dr Williams said: “The communication between primary and secondary care often has deficits.

“Somebody might spend several days going through an emergency admission to hospital, there might be all sorts of professionals involved, different discussions, scans and other tests, and the information that is relayed at the end of that - some might have been carefully summarised - but we often have a sense that more has happened in that period of time than gets handed over.”

Dr Williams added that patients were still unable to carry out even basic checks on their own medical information, such as making sure that the contact details held for them by various organisations involved in their care are correct.

“That’s something that the patient safety commissioner may well want to pick up on,” said Dr Williams.

“The communication that happens across these different interfaces - if you’re looking for error or harm, that’s where it may occur.”

Dr Williams added that patient safety issues are still “occurring regularly” but that there were also many examples “where a patient has received poor care where there isn’t a patient safety issue - where they have been let down, disappointed, where they haven’t had a good experience”.

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England has already appointed its first patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, following the damning Cumberlege report in 2020, which found that the concerns of women harmed by medical products including pelvic mesh and sodium valproate - an epilepsy drug linked to birth defects if taken during pregnancy - had been repeatedly dismissed.

Dr Amit Aggarwal, of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, told MSPs that a patient safety commissioner could be a form of “signal detection” for harm by weighing up patient anecdotes “in a systematic, objective, and evidence-based way”.

Dr Hughes, who was also giving evidence to MSPs, said she is “keen to see is that we get to a situation where it’s business as usual to have patient voices included in the design of services and when people are raising concerns, that they are listened to”.