There is now agreement that around 10 per cent of all hospital admissions to acute care hospitals give rise to preventable adverse events. These high levels of injury throw into sharp relief the unfairness of the tort based system of compensation for medically related injury where a relatively...

The publication in 1999 of To Err is Human unleashed the potential for systems of regulatory governance to improve the safety and quality of health care services for patients (Institute of Medicine, 2000). In addition, it marked a point at which patients, health care professionals and health...