Medical professionals: bearing good witness

• In May this year, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges published new guidance stating what healthcare professional bodies expect of their members in terms of standards, training and behaviour when acting as a witness.

Newly published guidance on how healthcare professionals should be trained to be expert witnesses aims to ensure more consistency and better standards in the evidence provided by medical expert witnesses. Expert witnesses play a vital part in the legal system, providing informed expert opinion to assist courts in understanding technical issues. The importance of expert opinion was made clear in the report Bearing Good Witness by Sir Liam Donaldson, former chief medical officer, which said: ‘The Courts need to be confident both that an appropriate witness will be available when needed and the evidence provided is of the highest quality, is based on high-quality research and represents the current state of knowledge about the issue in question.’

Until now, there has been no overall