Medical Law Review publishes LML article on negligent standards of care in diagnosis

Diagnosis lies at the heart of the medical encounter, yet it has received much less attention in legal literature than treatment. Though it is widely assumed that negligent diagnosis claims should be governed by the Bolam test, ‘Differentiating Negligent Standards of Care in Diagnosis’ argues that this is not always the case.

Co-authored by Prof. Kathy Liddell, Dr Jeff Skopek, Ms Isabelle Le Gallez and Dr Zoë Fritz, this paper reveals the underappreciated complexity of negligent diagnosis. The article disaggregates the diagnostic process into three acts: diagnosis, communication, and recording. By doing so, the authors argues that different legal standards, including alternatives to Bolam, might apply at different stages (for example proposing that the Montgomery standard is appropriate for the act of communicating diagnostic information to patients.

This paper is an output from a joint interdisciplinary project between LML and THIS Institute, ‘Improving how differential diagnosis is made, communicated, and recorded in acute care’. This research is generously supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Health Foundation that established the University of Cambridge Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute.

The full paper available here.