COMMENTARY

Primary care malpractice

Learning from primary care malpractice: past, present and future

B Hurwitz

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr B Hurwitz
Department of English, King’s College, London WC2R 2LS, UK; brian.hurwitz@kcl.ac.uk

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Understanding of UK primary care malpractice lags behind knowledge of US primary care malpractice

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Keywords: patient safety; medical errors; malpractice; primary care

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"Medications that clean bile and phlegm are a source of danger, and of blame for the person treating". Hippocrates. Affections 33.¹

The tangled relations between disease, treatment, patient harm, medical fallibility, and physician culpability have been debated since classical times. But it is only historically recently that actions alleging negligence by doctors have become a commonplace feature of the health care landscape.

One hundred years ago an experienced Scottish judge, while hearing a legal case against an Edinburgh general practitioner (see box), commented on its rarity: "This action is certainly one of a particularly unusual character. It is an action of damages against a medical man. In my somewhat long experience I cannot remember having seen a similar case before."²

Only a century later the medicolegal landscape of health care could hardly be more different. In the year 2000 the UK General Medical Council received 5000 complaints . . . [Full text of this article]

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Relevant Article

Learning from malpractice claims about negligent, adverse events in primary care in the United States

R L Phillips, Jr, L A Bartholomew, S M Dovey, G E Fryer, Jr, T J Miyoshi, and L A Green
Qual. Saf. Health Care 2004 13: 121-126. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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