On Negligence Of Medical Professionals

Negligence of medical professionals refers to the blamable mental status where medical professionals breach their duties in their medical activities and relavant auxiliary activities, thus leading to the injuries of patients. Negligence of medical professionals has its three main characteristics: the subject shall be a medical professional; it occurs in the process of medical treatment or its relavant activities; the judgment criteria is objective.By the standard of performance manner, the negligence of medical professionals can be divided into act negligence and omission negligence. Negligence of medical professionals is a breach of duty, including duty of care and duty of loyalty, by a medical professional. Accordingly, negligence of medical professionals can be divided into negligence of care duty breach and negligence of loyalty duty breach.. Duty of care refers to common professional skills and due caution and care required for medical professionals during their performance of duties, while duty of loyalty requires medical professionals being loyal and honest and for the best benefit of patients, during their conducting medical treatments.Judgment criteria for the negligence of medical professionals include abstract ones and the concrete ones. Abstract criteria for judging the breach of duty of care include professional level of medical treatment and auxiliary criteria. To determine the professional levels of medical treatment, factors such as the scientific development, expectation rights of the patients, innovation of medical professionals, inexperience of medical professionals, etc. Auxiliary criteria include speciality, locality, urgency, discretion, the best judgment rule and the expert-level difference. The abstract criterion for judging the breach of loyalty duty is whether the purpose of medical professionals'behaviors is for the best profit of the patients, which should be specified on the base of specific kind of loyalty duty. The specific criteria for judging negligence of medical professionals include provisions of laws and regulations, diagnosing, treating and nursing norms, technical operating instructions, internal bylaws of medical institutions, industrial practices, medical literatures, special agreements of parties concerned. The specific criteria and the abstract criteria should be used in combination to judge whether there is negligence of the medical professionals. The Hand formula can also be used as an auxiliary means for judging the breach of the duty of care.The negligence due to breaches of care duty appears as different patterns in different phases of the medical services, including that during diagnosis, that during medical treatment, that during operation, that during injection, that during blood drawing and transfusion, that during radiation therapy, that during medication,that due to the breach of the duties to make and preserve the medical records, that during nursing, etc.There are four types of the loyalty duties, including notifying duty, medical transferring duty, secret keeping duty, and duty to properly exercise discretionary right. In addition, duty of mandatory diagnosis and treatment can be included in loyalty duty. Accordingly, negligence of medical professionals due to the breach of loyalty duty can be divided into five categories.