GPs in Ireland often respond poorly to patient complaints and they need to learn how to apologise to patients if an error or adverse event does occur, it has been claimed.

According to Kilkenny GP and former chairman of the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP), Dr Richard Brennan, like any other professionals, GPs make mistakes and this can lead to patient complaints. However, he believes that in many cases, patients will be forgiving when doctors makes mistakes, ‘the problem is they are often not given an opportunity to do so'.

This, he insisted, is a major cause of the ‘epidemic of medical litigation' in this country.

"GPs make errors - they happen. And they often lead to patient complaints. However, once we are asked to give feedback on issues that may have arisen with patients or to respond, we tend to fall down on the job and become defensive," he commented.

He said that in many cases, GPs are not able to take on board complaints or negative comments, ‘and fail to respond as other businesses would do with customers or clients'.

‘We are not good at this. We need to tackle this deficit in order to deal with the unsustainable level of medical litigation in this country, including a massive rise in the number of professional regulatory and negligence cases being taken against GPs," Dr Brennan said.

He noted that if GPs do not encourage patient feedback about issues that arise in everyday practice, even if they seem trivial, ‘these tend to accumulate in the patient's mind'.

"Ultimately, if patients get frustrated enough by this lack of two-way communication, they find they have no other place to complain but the Medical Council, or to go through the legal system," he pointed out.

Dr Brennan said that in his experience with the Medical Council and the Medical Protection Society, which provides professional indemnity to healthcare professionals, ‘much of what happens in medical litigation has resulted from a breakdown in doctor-patient communication and trust'.

"If GPs do nothing else, they must learn to acknowledge error or adverse events, and learn how to apologise to patients. We need to learn how to say sorry because that will often avoid what can be catastrophic consequences," he added.

Dr Brennan made his comments in Forum, the Journal of the ICGP.