Too many Britons die from medical mistakes

Speak to doctors and, if they are being truthful, they will tell you about the dead people: the patients who could have lived had they been treated in another way. Different doctors envisage these dead people in different ways. One surgeon says that he, and all surgeons, have in their minds their own private graveyard. In it lie their mistakes.

Adam Kay, a writer and former doctor, has written of an obstetrics consultant who used a brasher analogy. She used to tell her trainees “that by the time they retire there’ll be a bus full of dead kids and kids with cerebral palsy, and that bus is going to have their name on the side.”