Negligence Case

​The duty of care in relation to the tort of negligence is arguably less of a dramatic issue in the UK than it is in the US, but the subject still bears analysis, regarding the over-abundance of case law on the subject of the duty of care, and precisely what constitutes it. Often, when a common law structure relies on precedent that builds on itself over time, the issue can be confused as terminology shifts and changes over the years, as practices and standards also change. It does seem likely that the precise formulation of the general approach to the duty of care is of limited practical importance. Defining standards of reasonability, therefore, becomes more important than formulating a blanket approach which may not fit all individual situations. The basic assumption of the current investigation is that the system in the UK which draws between negligence torts and malpractice is based on an ethical standard of care that needs to be more clearly defined, lest the same kind of legal mire which has led to over-litigation of malpractice in the US becomes the new standard.

​In the UK, malpractice is a tort, and can be understood in terms of the duty of care and the responsibility that the physician or healthcare professional owes to the patient in a helping and ethical relationship which is also culturally sensitive and based on a framework of positive communication. “Ex post communication is likely to increase liability risks by informing patients about medical errors. For this reason, it seems more likely that ex post communication will be chilled as liability risk increases, implying that more ex post conversations should have taken place when liability risks were lower” (Hymant and Silvertt, 2005). There are various perspectives when it comes to prognostication about the future of medical liability or negligence torts in the UK, with some commentators being more dire than others; however, many seem to agree that in the future, the UK may face a system of medical negligence mirroring that of the US. The basic reason for this assumption is that the legal principles of negligence applied in both the UK and the US are very similar, when it comes to the medical field, and both countries also have problems with applying standards of reasonability and duty of care when it comes to healthcare. “In both countries a patient must show that a doctor, who owed a duty of care, was in breach of that duty of care and that the breach was causative of a reasonably foreseeable harm” (Atiyah, 2013). In England whether a breach of care and medical ethics has occurred is determined by balancing what happened in the practice against a sort of reasonable physician standard. There is the danger that negligence torts will increase in the UK as well as the US; policymakers must therefore prioritize their efforts.

​Because duty of care is such a vital concept to UK negligence torts in the medical field, proper clarification of