The following is a continuation of the MedLaw column in the January issue.
If, despite your best efforts, your patient suffers a poor outcome and you are being sued for malpractice, you would ideally like to stop the process before it reaches the courtroom. To that end, your attorney would file a Motion for Summary Judgment, asking the judge to dismiss the case as a matter of law because the plaintiff cannot meet their burden of proof. The plaintiff would be required to “lay bare their proof” that it was actually your conduct that was the proximate cause of the harm.
The judge may decide the Motion on papers alone or may hold a hearing at which the attorneys can offer argument but there will not be any witnesses called. Your “witness” will, therefore, be the medical record. Courts generally loathe to deny a plaintiff their day in court, and so the record must be very clear as to the patient’s resistance to your efforts to work with them and your informing them of the serious consequences of their non-compliance and of the likelihood that it would cause the very harm that they then suffered.
If this Motion fails and the matter proceeds to trial, you still have strong defenses to raise based on the patient’s non-compliance:
- Contributory negligence is an archaic defense that is still retained in few jurisdictions. It holds that a plaintiff who has any fault at all in their injuries may not recover damages for those injuries. If you are in one of those jurisdictions, your ability to demonstrate that patient noncompliance contributed at all to the claimed harm will bar any recovery against you.
- Comparative negligence does exactly what its name implies: it compares the level of fault for each side. In some jurisdictions, no amount of plaintiff fault bars recovery, and in others, there is a cut-off beyond which the plaintiff is barred. If a case goes through, any recovery will be offset by the proportion of the plaintiff’s fault. In any comparative negligence jurisdiction, patient non-compliance will be a critical issue, because even if the case is not barred and the patient wins, damages will be reduced.
The plaintiff’s duty of mitigation applies to the conduct of the patient after a harm has been recognized. Plaintiffs must show that they did what they reasonably could to minimize the effect that the negligence for which they are suing had on them. Even if you do have actionable liability for an error of your own, a patient non-compliant with well-advised recommendations for correction comes into evidence and acts as a damages offset.
When dealing with a persistently non-compliant patient, think ahead to how you would counter a malpractice claim when you create the record. A clear contemporaneous record of the patient’s ongoing non-compliant conduct despite your efforts to have them act in a medically responsible way is the key to a solid defense.
This article was written by Dr. Medlaw, a physician and medical malpractice attorney.
