Our duty of care

What is our 'duty of care'?

Clinical scenario You have just started in post with a single-handed GP. You like the work, the patient group and all the staff you work with. After a while, however, you begin to feel just a little uneasy following a number of remarks from patients: “The doctor did not listen”, “I am not sure why the doctor prescribed this” and “I’d like a second opinion”. You have also noticed in passing on a...

It's our duty!

Antimicrobial drug resistance threat: our duty towards future generations.

1Assistant-Director General, Health Security and Environment, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland ([email protected]). Since their availability in the 1940s, antimicrobial drugs have been a miracle. For example, penicillin reduced death rates among patients with pneumonia and bacteraemia from approximately 90% to 10%. Seventy years later, however, increasing levels of antimicrobial res...

Self-handicapping and Managers’ Duty of Care

This Symposium Essay focuses on the relationship between managers’ duty of care and self-handicapping, or constructing obstacles to performance with the goal of influencing subsequent explanations about outcomes. Conventional explanations for failures of caretaking by managers have focused on motives (greed) and incentives (agency costs). These accounts of manager behavior have led some modern ...

Towards a duty of care for biodiversity.

The decline in biodiversity is a worldwide phenomenon, with current rates of species extinction more dramatic than any previously recorded. Habitat loss has been identified as the major cause of biodiversity decline. In this article we suggest that a statutory duty of care would complement the current mix of policy options for biodiversity conservation. Obstacles hindering the introduction of a...