Errors, Medicine and the Law

By:

Merry, A

Contributor(s):

McCall Smith, A

Publication details: Cambridge Cambridge University PressDescription: 254ISBN:

0521000882

Subject(s):

Summary: Untoward injuries are unacceptably common in medical treatment, at times with tragic consequences for patients. The phrases 'an epidemic of error' and 'the medical toll' have been coined to describe this problem of 'iatrogenic harm', which it has been suggested may have contributed to 98,000 deaths per year in the US. Some of these incidents are the result of negligence on the part of doctors, but more usually they are no more than inevitable concomitants of the complexity of modern healthcare. This book is fundamentally about distinguishing the former from the latter. Although medicine is used as the book's primary example, the points made apply equally to aviation, industrial activities, and many other fields of human endeavour. The book advocates a more informed alternative to the blaming culture which has increasingly come to dominate our response to accidents, whether in the medical field or elsewhere.

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Item type	Home library	Class number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Hillingdon Hospitals Library Services (Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation) Shelves	W44 MER (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Available		30112594

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Previous	W32.5 COR ABC of Medical Law	W32.5 DIM Legal aspects of death	W32.5 HOW Lecture notes: medical law and ethics	W44 MER Errors, Medicine and the Law	W50 BOW Primary care ethics	W50 BRI Medical ethics today : the BMA's handbook of ethics and law	W50 CAR Law, medicine and ethics :	Next

Monograph

Untoward injuries are unacceptably common in medical treatment, at times with tragic consequences for patients. The phrases 'an epidemic of error' and 'the medical toll' have been coined to describe this problem of 'iatrogenic harm', which it has been suggested may have contributed to 98,000 deaths per year in the US. Some of these incidents are the result of negligence on the part of doctors, but more usually they are no more than inevitable concomitants of the complexity of modern healthcare. This book is fundamentally about distinguishing the former from the latter. Although medicine is used as the book's primary example, the points made apply equally to aviation, industrial activities, and many other fields of human endeavour. The book advocates a more informed alternative to the blaming culture which has increasingly come to dominate our response to accidents, whether in the medical field or elsewhere.

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