Advancing Clinical Governance

Citation

Earl‐Slater, A. (2001), "Advancing Clinical Governance", British Journal of Clinical Governance, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 286-287. https://doi.org/10.1108/bjcg.2001.6.4.286.1

The back cover of this book claims that it is a long awaited follow up to a previous book called Clinical Governance – Making It Happen. So in that sense it should be an advance on what was written before. Is it? It should also be able to tell us or show us how to advance from say your current position, whatever it is, to somewhere better. Does it?

Myriam at the Forest Healthcare Trust, Whips Cross Hospital, London and Jonathan from the University of Wales College of Medicine have put together 14 chapters. These range from patient involvement in clinical governance, to the role of the chief executive in clinical governance, nursing and midwifery contributions to clinical governance, organisational issues, the role of the medical director, learning from complaints, the myth of accurate clinical information, NICE and clinical governance, to a chapter on revalidation, poor performance and clinical governance.

Overall the writing is clear and concise and as books go it is up‐to‐date.

Better still, each chapter is neatly grounded in a good dose of reality. No doubt this has been helped by the fact that some of the chapter authors include people in positions such as medical director, chief nurse, consultant, clinical risk manager and clinical governance lead. But there is also a good sprinkling of academics, or at least those with academic positions, writing some of the chapters. Happily these people keep their writing almost free from the abstractions, models and hypotheticals that some academics are known to invent and get tangled up in. I hope Myriam and Jonathan edit more books like this.

Sprinkled throughout the book are case studies. These are always interesting to read and I often wonder if I would have done things differently if I had to handle the case in question. But when I have time to wonder about these things, I also start to speculate on why I would want to handle the case differently, and what evidence I could muster to justify my train of thought. So in a really nice way this book really gets you thinking, it makes you advance from what you have just read to thinking about what you would do and how you would defend your approach.

In general there is a lot of good news, sharp writing, fresh insights and wonderful ideas that can be taken from this book and used in practice.

The final chapter in the book is a guide to sources. It covers the usual array of organisational names, addresses and phone numbers. But even this is very useful because many of you will have these details “somewhere” or know someone who has these details. There are some new contact details in the final chapter, again helping to keep us up‐to‐date as best it can.

Is it an advance on its predecessor? Yes. Can it help you advance from your current position to somewhere better? Yes. Should you have a personal copy? Yes. Should your boss have a copy? Your boss should have two copies – one at work and one at home!