You visit your doctor and physicians and expect them to give you the best medical assistance you might need. It is well known that, as the UK population continues to increase and mature, the NHS is under financial pressure, and the cost of care continues to increase. Claiming medical neglect raises the ultimate legal dilemma for many individuals.

Is it constitutionally permissible to submit a claim against the NHS, GP procedures and individual advisors, if the quality of service rendered has fallen below generally accepted levels?

Types of medical negligence

There are many several kinds of medical negligence that can result in important claims for compensation. They include:

  • Misdiagnosis
  • Missed diagnosis
  • Delayed diagnosis
  • Surgical errors
  • Failure to pass on the patient to a specialist
  • Wrong medication

This is only a glimpse of some of the most prominent claims of medical incompetence in the UK daily. One of the key challenges is that there is still a strong degree of dependency on the human decision-making method, considering medical science advancements.

We recognise that x-rays and scans can display a variety of various medical issues. Still, if read wrongly, they can lead farther down the misdiagnosis line, delayed diagnosis and serious problems.

At this point, it is necessary to note that while employers have a moral responsibility to care for their staff, medical professionals also have a legal obligation to care for their patients.

Measuring the duty of care

We always hear of medical practitioners’ moral responsibility to provide for their patients, so how is this evaluated? Is there a simple measure that indicates whether a medical practitioner performed the procedure correctly or whether the quality of treatment given was simply below the standard?

The evaluation test considers how a similarly seasoned medical practitioner may have behaved in the same case when evaluating whether or not a medical practitioner offered an appropriate level of treatment. This opens the case of the protectionist measures in several cases, mostly aimed at the GMC, but in practice, whether one or more medical professionals give substandard treatment.

This brings up the protectionism debate in several respects, which is frequently geared at the GMC. Still, whether one or more medical professionals may give substandard treatment, it is in the entire sector’s best interests to ensure that this is resolved earlier rather than later.

Proving medical negligence

It can be quite difficult to claim medical negligence in Scotland, in contrast to proving negligence by an employer that has neglected to perform a duty of responsibility to their workers. Considerable improvement has been made in the field of medical negligence investigations, medical examinations and, with hindsight, by reflecting on case specifics. However, proving causation of the injury is still quite difficult in some cases.

With the advantage of retrospect, understanding what happens in the weeks, months and years forward, it is still much better to look back, but this does not mean necessarily that a doctor will be responsible for compensation.

In some cases, it is difficult to distinguish if another medical practitioner would behave in a similar manner if the situation was kept similar. As a result, medical negligence claims require in-depth investigations, as well as expert opinions, to provide that the patient’s injury or adverse health conditions were a direct response to the negligent treatment by the carer.

Another problem in medical negligence claims is the possibility of misdiagnoses. The ever-growing increase in medical patterns appears to be one of the biggest challenges because many new forms of cancer have historically only been prevalent in their previous years. Today, for younger cancer patients, the situation is somewhat different, making it impossible to have a swift and reliable diagnosis of a particular medical condition.

There is, and will still be a moral problem for certain persons when contemplating medical neglect and claiming compensation. It should be remembered that the responsible authorities do not bother with moral dilemmas, rather they deal with cold hard evidence and, as tough as it can seem, it is important to resolve cases of neglect not only for the defendant but also for prospective patients.

Therefore, the moral dilemma may not be the stigma attached to seeking restitution from a healthcare practitioner but enabling negligence and misdiagnosis to continue, with future patients expected to suffer as a result.