Search Results

This chapter asks whether the language and idea of the doctor-patient partnership, which embraces the notion of patient autonomy, is one which also places responsibilities on patients as well as on healthcare providers. This chapter outlines the duties and responsibilities of doctors and the development of the understanding of the doctor-patient relationship as one of partnership. It analyses the implications of this, looking at the legal responsibilities of the autonomous patient in the context of an action for medical negligence.

This chapter looks at the exceptional cases where something seems wrong between patients and clinicians. Few professions routinely face the risk of causing so much damage to those they serve, sometimes as a result of the smallest oversight made under pressure. Also, medicine offers limited guarantees and treatment that offers considerable benefit may also carry unavoidable risks, some of which may be catastrophic. Patients have to decide whether the small possibility of risk is justified by the larger probability of benefit. Doctors may cause damage to their patients, therefore, without in any way behaving carelessly. With these caveats in mind, this chapter discusses the impact of medical negligence in the NHS, the liability of the clinician, and patients' rights of informed consent to medical care.

This chapter considers the threat to the medical profession posed by medical negligence claims. It develops an important argument made by Dingwall that the threat of litigation is best understood in terms of the symbolic challenge that this form of consumer activism poses to medical autonomy. The chapter is in three main parts. The first section reviews what is known about medical negligence claims. The second section draws on data collected for the evaluation which shed some new light on the threat posed by claims. The third section considers the symbolic threat of medical negligence and argues that it is this factor more than any other which explains the reaction of doctors to medical negligence.

This chapter argues that the offence of corporate manslaughter should have been made more fully applicable to public authorities such as the police and the army. It criticises scholarly neglect of the application of the offence to hospital trusts. It argues that a Marxist preoccupation with wrongs done by employers to employees has, to some extent, blinded scholars to the real need for use of the offence to combat combined employer-employee medical negligence towards the interests of consumers of public services, such as vulnerable or elderly hospital patients.

Doctors appearance in courts could be in three different situations: as an expert witness to support a medical opinion already secured or to explain a medical condition of a party or witness in litigation, both civil and criminal, as respondent in actions complaining of medical negligence or as accused in a criminal case for commission of offences under one or other penal laws or a medical professional acquiring a law degree wishing to pursue practice as a lawyer. Some of the age old practices of adopting ‘the finger test’ for a rape victim to suggest that the victim was habituated to sex are adversely commented as degrading exercises and the doctor shall know that sexual assault is not a medical phenomenon but a fact proved like in any other case. Enactments dealing with organ transplant, sex testing, medical termination, drugs, and cosmetics licensing, etc. contain penal provisions that trigger scope for action against erring doctors.