Challenging blame cultures. Supporting doctors. Driving systemic change.

Learn Not Blame challenges cultures of blame, punishment, and defensiveness within the NHS and replaces them with fairness, learning, and accountability. When things go wrong, too often individual doctors are blamed while systemic failures remain unexamined. Learn Not Blame exists to change that.

This campaign focuses on supporting doctors who have been mistreated in the workplace, frequently as a result of organisational failures, unsafe cultures, or flawed processes. In many cases, this mistreatment is further exacerbated by racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination. Learn Not Blame works to ensure that doctors are treated fairly and humanely, and that lessons are learned at a system level rather than harm being repeated.

Why Blame Causes Harm

Blame has become an entrenched response when concerns, incidents, or complaints arise. Individual doctors are often isolated, scrutinised, and punished while wider organisational context is ignored. This creates fear, suppresses learning, and causes lasting damage to careers, health, and wellbeing.

Blame-driven systems discourage openness and honesty. They prevent early resolution, escalate conflict, and allow unsafe practices and cultures to persist. For many doctors, the consequences are profound: professional, psychological, and personal.

Learn Not Blame: Where the Campaign Began

“Learn Not Blame” is DAUK’s central campaign and was launched in November 2018. Its original aim was to empower doctors to drive transformational change and challenge deeply embedded blame cultures within the NHS.

For too long, systemic failings have gone unexamined while individual clinicians have carried disproportionate responsibility. High-profile cases have demonstrated the devastating impact this can have on both doctors and patients. Learn Not Blame calls for a just culture – one that addresses mistakes fairly, prioritises learning, and values the people working within the system.

Who Is Learn Not Blame?

Learn Not Blame is a group of frontline doctors who volunteer their time to support colleagues who have been mistreated in the workplace.

Collectively, we bring vast experience across handling complex workplace cases, medicolegal processes, NHS organisational infrastructure and internal procedures, fitness to practise investigations and MPTS tribunals and regulatory processes.

Our work is informed by direct experience of how blame cultures operate and how damaging they can be when left unchallenged.

How DAUK Can Support You

DAUK supports doctors on both an individual and systemic level.

We provide:

• One-to-one case support for doctors experiencing workplace mistreatment
• Campaigning and advocacy to challenge unsafe cultures and practices
• Policy engagement to influence structural change and promote just culture across the NHS

By supporting individual doctors, we also work to expose and address the wider failures that allow harm to occur.

How It Actually Works

Learn Not Blame offers a structured, supportive approach to case handling.

From the point a case is submitted, we:

• Review the circumstances and context of the case
• Identify systemic issues, procedural failures, and points of unfairness
• Support doctors through complex and often intimidating processes
• Advocate for fair treatment and proportionate responses
• Use learning from cases to inform wider campaigning and policy work

Humanising the Process

Behind every case is a person.

As part of Learn Not Blame, we are launching a new article series led by Dr Simran Mann, focusing on the lived experiences of doctors who have undergone mistreatment in the workplace. Through in-depth interviews, the series aims to humanise the processes doctors are subjected to and shed light on the real impact of blame cultures.

Dr Mann opens the series by interviewing the former Learn Not Blame Chair, setting the scene for the stories that follow.

You can read the first article here