Dear Sir or Madam.
I am a specialist doctor. In recent years, I have noticed a marked trend towards increasing administrative obligations, which do not contribute to a higher quality of service. The vast majority of my colleagues, as well as specialists in other disciplines and other medical staff, feel the same way. Administrative measures serve only to find those responsible for possible mistakes, but they do not actually try to prevent mistakes, or do so only on paper. There is a lot of talk about quality, but in practice it is only quality on paper. In practice, these measures, which are taking up more and more of the time of doctors and other medical staff, are counterproductive.The aim is to raise the quality of the final service. The current measures are not contributing to this, and their implementation is taking up valuable time, and thus even having the opposite effect.I understand that there are conditions which, because of legislation, must be met, and this is the case in all regulated countries. Here, the approach is wrong, because the rules are made almost exclusively by people who do not know our business in practice and are not even interested in it. The proposal is to adopt rules at national level to regulate the amount of administrative work in hospitals, taking into account the current reality of the profession (number of staff per number of treatments, complex patients - an ageing population, etc.) and the time needed to carry out this administrative work. If they are adopted, they must also be realistically feasible.I propose that a working group be set up, made up of lawyers who are experts in the field of legal medicine and who also work in practice in this field, and doctors who are still employed full-time in the public sector and who actually carry out their work to the full. The umbrella professional organisations then adapt the rules to the specific characteristics of each specialty. Adequate time must also be allocated for the implementation of the measures, which must be taken into account in the organisation of work. Realistic working (and therefore staffing) norms must also be precisely defined to ensure the quality of the work.