A medical practitioner must adhere to accepted standards of care and adequately inform patients of risks; negligence must be proven to have caused the injury.

Introduction

[1] The Plaintiff alleges that the Defendants were negligent when they had provided treatment to the Achilles tendinitis suffered by him sometime in July 2019, the operation and the related post-treatment.

Summary Of The Applicable Law

[2] I will now deal with the applicable legal principles.

[3] The applicable law when dealing with allegations of negligence against hospitals and doctors is trite. I will attempt to summarize the applicable law in the following paragraphs before I deal with the present claim pleaded by the Plaintiff against the Defendants.

[4] I summarize the current legal position as follows:

4.1 A doctor or any medical practitioner owes a duty of care to his or her patient that must be discharged in "accordance with a practice accepted by a responsible body of medical men skilled in that particular art."

4.2 A doctor or any medical practitioner is not guilty of negligence if he or she has acted in accordance with such a practice even if there exists a body of opinion that takes a contrary view.

4.3 The said doctor or any medical practitioner also owes a duty of care to his or her patient to warn his patient of the material risk inherent in the treatment that is being proposed. This duty has been described as "the right of self-determination". The "Court will decide whether a patient has been properly advised of the risks associated with the treatment and no longer look at what a body of respectable members of the medical profession would do as a yardstick".

4.4 What a material risk will depend on the circumstances of the case and "whether a reasonable person in the patient's position would be likely to attach significance to the risk."

4.5 The medical practitioner is "duty bound by law to inform his or her patient, who is capable of understanding and appreciating such information of the risks involved in any proposed treatment" to enable the patient to make an election of whether to proceed with the proposed treatment with knowledge of the risks involved or decline to be subjected to such treatment."

4.6 This does not however mean that this Court is bound by the opinion, or the practice accepted by the medical profession. If the "body of medical opinion does not withstand logical analysis, the Court may hold that it is not reasonable or responsible and may then depart from it."

[5] These principles of law have been gleaned from the following authorities:

5.1 Foo Fio Na v. Dr Soo FookMun & Anor 2006 MarsdenLR