Abstract
Medical malpractice litigation is usually the result of an unexpected and undesirable outcome in our customers (patients) and when the affected individual or family perceives the outcome as being due to carelessness or poor clinical care. In the present era of modern medicine, the management of any given patient involves many layers of physicians and health care professionals from encounter to completion of care, for any specific condition. With this complexity of medical care, there is an increased risk of some error along the route towards the end result of cure or achieving relief and patient satisfaction. As a result, each health professional owes a separate duty to the patient within his or her area of practice. Although an individual health professional is not directly liable for the mistakes of others, in complex cases with multiple encounters by several health professionals, it is often difficult to determine the individual responsible for the outcome. However, in many of the cases, despite checks along the way involving multiple layers of health care workers, errors are often overlooked and missed by several health professionals.
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Fong, I.W. (2011). Overview of Medico-legal Issues. In: Medico-Legal Issues in Infectious Diseases. Emerging Infectious Diseases of the 21st Century. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8053-3_14
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