• Clinical governance

In these days where corporate governance seems a watchword for dubious practice within multinational companies, such terms often are bandied around without much thought given to their meaning. A similar word, clinical governance, is used within medicine particularly by administrators and funding bodies who set their own agendas within health care.

In 1998, the National Health Service (NHS) introduced into the United Kingdom namely, the concept of clinical governance. This was used to denote the systematic coordination and promotion of activities that contribute to continuous improvement of quality of care.¹

The broad elements that make up the panoply of clinical governance include the processes of clinical audit, risk management, professional development and patient participation. As such, clinical governance requires better communication systems, organisational change and a paradigm shift on the part of clinicians toward more open and impartial evaluation of clinical care and its outcomes.² It is worth observing, albeit sadly for the traditionalists, that this laudable …