Doctors are to be reassured they can safely report a driver who has ignored medical advice that suggests they might put others at risk, in the wake of the Glasgow bin lorry crash.
Partly influenced by the weaknesses in the current reporting system exposed by Harry Clarke’s failure to disclose his poor medical history, the General Medical Council is to issue stronger guidelines to underline a doctor’s right to breach patient confidentiality in the public interest.
A GMC spokeswoman said: “Doctors were quite anxious about reporting patients. [It] is quite a difficult part of medical practice to put aside medical confidentiality.”
GPs will be allowed to report a patient to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) if they ignore repeated requests by the doctor to stop driving voluntarily. The strengthened guidance is being issued as part of a wider GMC review of the duty of confidentiality, which ends in February.
Those measures were welcomed by David Wilson, the lawyer for one of the six people killed, Jacqueline Morton, but he said the family also believed that only doctors with access to a motorist’s full medical history should be authorised to sign them off as fit to drive.
“A system wholly dependent on people with a livelihood at stake providing the DVLA with full disclosure is simply not fit for purpose,” Wilson said. “The consequences of that system failing are incidents like this.”
