The Defence Medical Services

Trauma governance in the UK defence medical services.

Introduction Clinical governance is concerned with the application and enforcement of good clinical practice [1-4] and the management of military trauma patients is no exception. To this end, a framework of governance has been implemented to facilitate best practice, and to ensure that Service personnel who are seriously injured on deployed operations receive exemplary care. This paper describe...

Medical Defence

Medical Defence

concerns us all, for with it may be closely bound up our future prosperity and happiness, our professional reputation, even our professional existence. I propose to draw on my experiences and give you some impressions gained from a good many years' service now, on the Council of the Medical Defence Union. Most people know, no doubt, that that is not the only society which is concerned with such...

The role of trauma scoring in developing trauma clinical governance in the Defence Medical Services.

This paper discusses mathematical models of expressing severity of injury and probability of survival following trauma and their use in establishing clinical governance of a trauma system. There are five sections: (i) Historical overview of scoring systems--anatomical, physiological and combined systems and the advantages and disadvantages of each. (ii) Definitions used in official statistics--...

In defence of medical ethics.

A number of recent publications by the philosopher David Seedhouse are discussed. Although medicine is an eminently ethical enterprise, the technical and ethical aspects of health care practices can be distinguished, therefore justifying the existence of medical ethics and its teaching as a specific part of every medical curriculum. The goal of teaching medical ethics is to make health care pra...