Law 3101A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Health Professional, Adversarial System, Catastrophic Injury

• School: Western University
• Department: Law
• Course: Law 3101A/B
• Professor: Robert Solomon

Document Summary

Liability is not limited to the intervention itself, but also any aspect of the professional responsibilities: record keeping, diagnosing the problem, taking a history, designing a treatment plan. Interviewing and assessing a patient: making a referral or placement, failing to control or protect a patient, hiring, training, assigning, and supervising staff. Health professionals cannot be expected to guarantee the outcome of the services that they provide. Negligence is the failure to exercise the standard of care expected of a reasonable person in all the circumstances of the case: negligence = careless or substandard care in terms of o(cid:374)e"s profession. Negligence v. incompetence: negligence allegation is made in terms of a specific act, diagnosis, or other decision. Part 2: the elements of a negligence action. The framework analyzing a negligence action against a health professional is identical to that used in any other negligence action.