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Comment by valbaca | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but what's the point of this?

In the US, doctors will not tell you if they made a mistake and caused your condition to worsen, or if the mistake caused the death of your loved one.

In the UK, doctors are allowed (and by the looks of this memo, expressly encouraged) to inform the patient of their mistakes and to apologize.

I believe he was being facetious.

In the UK there is a requirement - the duty of candour - to tell people a mistake has been made, and to apologise for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_candour

I posted it here because I've seen a bunch of apologies also posted to HN recently, and most of them were lousy.

Why do people post apologies to HN? Any examples?

I've certainly apologized a few times - usually for writing something that is badly worded, unintentionally inflammatory or simply plain wrong.

I certainly apologised profusely when I wrote something that annoyed dang.... :-)

there have been a few businesses that lost data, or got hacked, or shut down.

That's because of the lawsuit culture in the US, apologizing for a mistake admits wrongdoing and could expose you to millions of dollars in damages.

I had a then-teenage cousin who had a surgical...geez, either a breathing stent or a cerebrospinal shunt, I forget...installed backwards, resulting in minor permanent brain damage before the surgeon realized his mistake.

This apparently involved the surgeon sprinting back into the operating room past my aunt and uncle, yelling "I screwed up your kid, meet me here with a lawyer in three hours!"

The point is that you should apologize if your mistake harms someone. Refusing to own up to your errors is unprofessional. That's hardly limited to medicine.

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