Duty of care is the first element of a negligence claim: the legal obligation to take reasonable care to avoid foreseeable harm to another person. In the physician-patient relationship the duty is well established and rarely contested, which is why most medical malpractice litigation turns on breach of the standard of care and causation rather than on whether a duty existed.
Duty questions still arise at the margins of medical practice: the on-call specialist who has not yet seen the patient, the consultant asked for an informal opinion, the radiologist or pathologist who never meets the patient, the physician treating someone other than the plaintiff, and the duty owed to third parties affected by a patient’s condition. The framework for recognizing novel duties derives from the analysis in Anns and as adopted and developed in Canadian law, which asks about foreseeability, proximity, and residual policy considerations.
Posts tagged Duty of Care analyze Ontario decisions in which the existence or scope of a duty of care was genuinely in issue in the medical context.
Ontario Court of Appeal reinstates novel psychiatric malpractice claim by family member of patient who killed his father, sending duty of care question to trial.
A psychiatrist was seriously assaulted by a patient. The BC Court of Appeal confirmed that hospitals owe a duty of care to medical staff, and that the standard is contextual.
Free, confidential consultations. Paul reviews every potential case personally and tells you honestly whether it merits investigation.