Should doctors apologise to patients?

A recent decision of the medical practitioner’s tribunal (the tribunal service for doctors in the UK) to suspend a junior doctor for two months has led to widespread concern in the medical community. The case involves Nithya Pandian, a doctor who claims that she examined a patient when the patient denies that an examination took place.1 The tribunal had to determine whether Pandian did, in fact, examine the patient. After hearing testimony from the patient, the patient’s husband, and Pandian, the tribunal concluded that it was more likely than not that Pandian had not examined the patient, even though her medical notes suggest otherwise.In a statement produced in the course of an earlier investigation by the NHS trust where Pandian worked, she had written “if Patient A feels that I documented this [the abdominal examination] without examination then I sincerely apologise for all the distress that Patient A went through…
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