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Professor Clifford Hughes, CEO, NSW Clinical Excellence Commission Words: Steve Dow
Convalescing in a darkened room for two months, the young Hughes devoured an encyclopedia of children's tales left for him by the family's Scottish-born GP. Periodically, the doctor would drive up to the family's Chatswood home in a black Holden and sit on the edge of the boy's bed, talking to him about the stories. "His compassion and his stature … made such an impression on me that I wanted to be a doctor," says Hughes, who eventually became a senior partner in a cardiothoracic surgical practice at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and headed the unit for 10 years until 2005. Over the years, Hughes's contribution to medicine has been wide-ranging. He frequently works in developing countries, such as China, and he is currently working on developing a new anti coagulation drug at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Since January 2005, Hughes, now 62, has headed the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission, which monitors and records the reporting of doctors', nurses' and other health professionals' medical mistakes or "adverse events" – errors that harm patients and sometimes contribute to deaths. "We've gone from a culture where people didn't talk about adverse events to one where they now talk about them," says Hughes, whose commission deals with up to 500 confirmed "serious" adverse events in hospitals and medical practices a year. But the role frequently puts him in the firing line. He has faced strong criticism for a report he co-produced after an inquiry in October into a patient's miscarriage in the toilets at Royal North Shore Hospital. Hughes agrees the inquiry's terms of reference were "narrow" but says the report's recommendations would lead to better outcomes for pregnant women in hospitals across NSW and that the inquiry attempted to speak with the patient and her partner but the couple's solicitor repeatedly declined the requests. He has received nothing but plaudits, however, for his pro bono international work. He has travelled to China five times to head open-heart surgery teams and operated in India and Bangladesh. Hughes recalls a Bangladeshi village leader who thanked him for operating on his terminally ill mother in 1981. "He said: 'I'm 65. You're the first stranger who's done something for me without asking anything in return.' I think that says a lot about humanity and where we need to focus our efforts."
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When he was eight years old, Clifford Hughes had whooping cough. So serious was such an illness in the 1950s that there were times his parents worried he would not pull through.
