All over the world, people place their trust in medical professionals. Be they doctors, dentists, opticians, paramedics, pharmacists or nurses, we assume that when we turn to them for help and guidance, we will receive the correct advice and care.

This is particularly true when people are hit by serious conditions, such as cancer or heart disease. The assumption is that the clinician will make a correct diagnosis and prescribe a course of treatment that will control or get rid of the problem.

Yet there is a reality to the medical profession, as there is to any other specialization, which invites people to have confidence in them. This is that each and every person involved is human, and human beings make mistakes. It is not what ordinary people want to believe of their doctors, but there is no such thing as the infallible medical professional.

Yet the fiction that doctors should get it right every time, persists in many societies, most obviously in the United States. There, the legal profession makes a very good living indeed from medical negligence suits, fought on a no-win, no-fee basis. The lure for the lawyers is that if they do triumph, they will not only pick up their fees and costs from the defendant, but they will also take a large chunk — not infrequently around 60 percent — of the damages that are awarded to their clients. Yet there are perverse consequences to the willingness of judges and juries to make substantial awards in clinical negligence cases.

The barely credible story is told of an American woman on a US flight who was choking on a piece of food. The pilot asked if there was a doctor on board and a surgeon hurried to where the woman was close to asphyxiating. Using airline cutlery, he performed a tracheotomy, saved the woman’s life and received the congratulations of all the other passengers. A few months later, the hero received a writ from the woman’s lawyers, on the grounds that he had operated without her consent and left her with a disfiguring scar on her neck. This in itself was bad enough, but the case went to trial and a jury found for the woman and awarded substantial damages. The greatest damage however was that when the news of the judgment spread among the US medical profession, many doctors decided that, whatever the emergency, if they were on a plane and medical help was called for, they would stay in their seats and carry on reading their books.

This is not however to say that genuine medical malpractice should not be pointed out, the people who get it wrong, asked to explain their mistakes and measures then taken to see if the same errors cannot be avoided in future.

The initiative by Minister of Health Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah to create a register of medical errors is basically very sound. At the very least this register is going to help expose those people within the Kingdom’s health sector, who are working here with false qualifications. Despite the best efforts of most hospitals and clinics, fraudsters will seem to be getting jobs here. Providing the new medical error register is kept properly, it ought to become a great deal easier to spot possible evidence that someone working within the sector is either unqualified or for other reasons, such as lack of refresher training or health issues, has become incompetent at his or her work.

Moreover, the fact that hospital administrations will now know that there is a way that the record of their clinicians can be monitored and poor practice identified, may cause them to tighten their management.

The success of the register will of course depend not merely on input from patients but also the readiness of medical facilities to embrace a level of transparency that some have sought to avoid until now. Nor should it be imagined that patients’ complaints are automatically going to carry merit. Distraught relatives may blame doctors for a family death, when in reality there was nothing that could have been done to save that life. It is therefore important that the ministry is able to evaluate the worth of complaints about medical performance, to ensure that individuals, or indeed institutions are not unfairly targeted.

And finally, perhaps it is necessary for everyone to lower his or her expectations of medical advisers. Most of the time they will be right. But sometimes, when they have had a row at home or are themselves feeling off color or have other pressing problems on their minds, they will sometimes make mistakes, just as the rest of us make mistakes in our own workplaces.