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, the article ‘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, the article unbundles the diagnostic process into three acts: diagnosis, communication, and recording. The authors then argue that different legal standards, including alternatives to Bolam, should apply at different stages. For example, the Montgomery standard of care is arguably appropriate for the act of communicating diagnostic information to patients. The authors’ conclusions have thought-provoking implications for negligence litigation, as well as medical education, clinical guidelines, and patient care.
This paper is an output from a joint interdisciplinary project between LML and THIS, ‘Improving how differential diagnosis is made, communicated, and recorded in acute care’. The project is generously supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Health Foundation that established the University of Cambridge Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute.
The full paper is available here.