Organisational readiness for a public inquiry

It starts much sooner than you might think!

A health care organisation, whether in the NHS or private sector, may never know when it may eventually end up being the focus of a Public inquiry. The highly skilled nature of the care given to patients, a growing population with increasing needs together with what can seem to be near constant capacity and budgetary pressures could potentially be a factor in any number of high-profile investigations and inquiries.

What can your organisation do to prepare?

Lawful, robust decision making

In our Board and senior manager training we cover how organisations can best prepare themselves for a public inquiry by ensuring they make lawful and robust decisions in the first instance, with strong systems to support effective and efficient practice. That way, an issue of major public concern is hopefully less likely to happen in the first place and, if it does and a public inquiry ensues later down the line, organisations and their senior leadership team are more likely to be able to justify what happened and to withstand the careful scrutiny of an inquiry chair.

Audit trail

Coupled with good decision making comes a good audit trail. If a decision was not properly documented or a conversation on a difficult topic was not recorded, it will be difficult to persuade an inquiry chair that it did actually happen!

• Ensure a good document trail - that includes key management decisions but also key conversations and discussions, perhaps exploring and considering whether and how to deal with a potential warning sign (which could lead to more serious issues later).

• Review your retention schedule – are documents being kept for a sufficiently long time if they are needed but not so long as to breach good record keeping and UK GDPR requirements?

Management of an inquiry response

If a public inquiry affecting your organisation is established, consider the following actions to help with your organisation’s response:

• Nominate an inquiry executive lead – where the inquiry directly affects your organisation, it is important that there is Board level oversight of the organisation’s response and to ensure that the response team has the support that it needs.

• Nominate an inquiry operational lead – it is likely that this person will be working full time or nearly full time on the inquiry so consider capacity as well as their necessary project management skills.

• Consider an inquiry response team – who will the inquiry operational lead need to help your organisation fully respond to the inquiry? It will depend on the focus of the inquiry but may include communications, HR and IT representatives as well as clinical input.

• Consider communications – it may be necessary to provide information and support externally to patients and other stakeholders about the inquiry, as well as to staff (who may need support with the process and/or begin to gather any relevant information that the inquiry will need too)

• Documentation – as above, your organisation will already hopefully have clear audit trails of key decisions affecting the matter under the inquiry’s consideration. Consider collating that material and securely storing in a way that allows later retrieval easily. Reflect on organisational memory issues – if someone leaves, will their knowledge on the inquiry be retained?

• Listen and improve if needed – if lessons from the incident under consideration by the inquiry can be learnt now, start to work on them and make improvements. You do not need to wait for the inquiry to report and make recommendations. Any inquiry Chair will be keen to know what you have already done to make changes as a responsible organisation.

Is your organisation affected by a public inquiry? If so, get in touch with our specialist lawyers.