Medical malpractice, perceived and actual, especially in the current environment of fast paced technological advances, is among the most critical health issues in India today. Related litigation has been increasing year by year, especially since the coming into force of the Consumer Protection Act. 1986. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed survey of the law under the Consumer Protection Act, the law of torts, as well as the Penal Code. It explains how the law operates in the country in the background of increasing doctor- patient conflict and rights consciousness among patients, the ignorance of doctors about law, and the complex problems faced by doctors in public hospitals. It analyses all major cases to date. In parts it addresses doctors in particular and provides guidelines and check lists to help them avoid charges of negligence. It throws significant light on issues relating to medicine and ethics, the duties of doctors, the rights and responsibilities of patients, defences available to doctors, likely areas of litigation in individual medical specialities and types of surgery, and the 'consent' of patients. The book also examines relevant law and cases from other countries.

J.F. Crul The topic Legal Aspects of Anaesthesia is still rarely treated in book publications, but deserves increasing attention as more cases of litigation occur each year and anaesthetists also become more aware of the legal structure within which they practice their profession. I am happy to have been able to obtain the cooperation of experts in this field from various European countries. The contributing authors in this book come from both the anaesthesia and surgery side as well as from the jurisprudential background. As these two fields have their own professional jargon we have been very careful in using definitions, avoiding that a specific term might lead to misunderstanding and confusion. The international authorship did not facilitate this task. The subject of this book was also the topic of a meeting of the European Academy of Anaesthesiology held at the French Study Center, La Suquette, Saint Vincent Ie Palue~ held three years before publication of this book. The organizers G. Barrier, J.F. Crul, and J. Lassner felt the need for a book publication presenting the state of the art of anaesthesia and the law in European countries. With the present book this plan has been realized. During the meeting many subjects were thoroughly discussed and the editor considered a number of them as very informative and therefore these were included in this book.

In India every year many people die and suffer due to medical negligence. This medical negligence is contributed by either the medical doctor or the clinical establishment like hospitals or nursing homes or diagnostic centers. This book is about the medical negligence occurring in India and the legal aspect in dealing with the medical negligence. The ones who suffer from medical negligence are often misguided and they never get the proper resolution or justice and they end up wasting money here and there without approaching the appropriate authority. This book gives a overview to all the sufferers where and how to address their grievances. This book also serves as a guide book for the lawyers who want to know the procedure to deal with medical negligence cases. This book is also helpful to the doctors who want themselves to be on the safer side for treating patients without committing any negligence.

This book brings together some of the most respected Asian and Australasian experts on medical liability to provide insightful perspectives on civil and criminal law from selected Australasian jurisdictions. It focuses on the idiosyncrasies of the existing law and case law in this part of the world with regard to medical liability, adopting a comparative and critical perspective. The aim is to provide an overview of the basic elements of medical liability in Asian and Australian jurisdictions, as well as the latest developments and general trends in jurisprudence. Given the broad range of jurisdictions covered, the book offers lawmakers, health administrators and practitioners, both in law and medicine, an alternative approach to the delivery of health care. Further, it is essential reading for all those (academics, lawyers, judges, researchers, practicing doctors and those involved in the growing area of legal medicine) working in medical liability, specially in the Australasian context.

A Measure of Malpractice tells the story and presents the results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study, the largest and most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken of the performance of the medical malpractice system. The Harvard study was commissioned by the government of New York in 1986, in the midst of a malpractice crisis that had driven insurance premiums for surgeons and obstetricians in New York City to nearly $200,000 a year. The Harvard-based team of doctors, lawyers, economists, and statisticians set out to investigate what was actually happening to patients in hospitals and to doctors in courtrooms, launching a far more informed debate about the future of medical liability in the 1990s. Careful analysis of the medical records of 30,000 patients hospitalized in 1984 showed that approximately one in twenty-five patients suffered a disabling medical injury, one quarter of these as a result of the negligence of a doctor or other provider. After assembling all the malpractice claims filed in New York State since 1975, the authors found that just one in eight patients who had been victims of negligence actually filed a malpractice claim, and more than two-thirds of these claims were filed by the wrong patients. The study team then interviewed injured patients in the sample to discover the actual financial loss they had experienced: the key finding was that for roughly the same dollar amount now being spent on a tort system that compensates only a handful of victims, it would be possible to fund comprehensive disability insurance for all patients significantly disabled by a medical accident. The authors, who came to the project from very different perspectives about the present malpractice system, are now in agreement about the value of a new model of medical liability. Rather than merely tinker with the current system which fixes primary legal responsibility on individual doctors who can be proved medically negligent, legislatures should encourage health care organizations to take responsibility for the financial losses of all patients injured in their care.

This text analyses a variety of issues concerning medicine and the application of law governing its practice, education, and research. The author addresses them in the light of recent developments in technology and views them from a comparative perspective by focusing on Indian case law and jurisdictions from other countries.

This new work adds to the theoretical understanding and discussion of possible solutions to various conceptual and practical problems that arise within the field of medical negligence - an area whose legal treatment is perceived, both in England and Germany, as containing a number of special difficulties and shortcomings. In addition it seeks to make a contribution to the developing field of comparative law, by employing a detailed and closely focused analytical approach in a tightly defined subject area. These twin aims serve to reveal the similarities and differences between two legal cultures in a particularly clear and striking way. The book offers an analysis which is neutral as between the English and German approaches. The issues are dealt with thematically so far as possible, so that the respective treatments in each country of a given matter, eg the standard of care owed by medical practitioners, are discussed side-by-side. The book thus avoids the 'country-report' style, whereby the systems are presented largely separately from each other. What is of particular interest is how, notwithstanding their common starting point in terms of the application of the fault-principle under private law, the detailed rules in the two countries differ markedly. This is true both in the divergent way that claims are structured and argued, and also quite often as regards their substantive outcome. It will be of interest to comparative lawyers, tort and medical lawyers, and practising lawyers working in these areas.

This book covers the questions ranging from medical ethics and points of law to issues in medical negligence viewed from the standpoint of practically all specialities in the practice of medicine and surgery. The discussions are enlivened by reports on illustrative cases and human interest stories which would be of great interest to patients, practising doctors, hospitals, advocates and members of Consumer Fora. The chapters on almost every branch of Medicine and Surgery contains a wealth of up-to-date information on the current scientific understanding of the subject, which intends to present medical malpractice in the larger context of the admirable advances in medicine which have made life so much safer and better in the last few decades. The book contains detailed guidelines to the doctors, patients and hospitals in three different chapters with a concluding chapter on Medical Insurance. The book is written in a lucid style which would be understood not only by physicians and lawyers but also the general public.