New Delhi, August 09: The Supreme Court has held that doctors have a duty to inform patients about the adverse effects of a particular medicine prescribed by them or otherwise it might amount to medical negligence.
“The law on medical negligence also has to keep up with the advances in the medical science as to treatment as also diagnostics. Doctors increasingly must engage with patients during treatments especially when the line of treatment is a contested one and hazards are involved.
“Standard of care in such cases will involve the duty to disclose to patients about the risks of serious side effects or about alternative treatments,” a bench of Justices S B Sinha and Deepak Verma observed.
The bench passed the observation while holding a prominent Kolkata hospital — Advanced Medicare Research Institute (AMRI) — and four doctors guilty of “medical negligence” for causing the death of Anuradha, a 36-year-old US-based woman doctor who died in May 1998.
It imposed a penalty of Rs five lakh on the hospital and Rs one lakh on Dr Mukherjee who first administered her heavy doses of steroid — ‘Depomedrol’.
The apex court regretted that neither the hospital bothered to extend proper facilities nor the doctors followed established practices in treating the victim whose husband Dr Kunal Saha is also a professor in HIV research, working in the US. The doctor couple had come to India during a holiday when the tragic incident occurred.
The apex court which, however, absolved the doctors of criminal negligence, asked the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC) to decide the extent of compensation to be paid to the victim’s family which had filed a claim for Rs 77 crore.
The SC rejected the arguments of the hospital and the doctors who claimed with the support of medical research materials that administration of the excess amount of steroid may not prove fatal in such cases.
The bench said it was not bound by such research materials as there are also enough research materials to prove that excess dose of steroids could prove fatal in several cases.
“A court is not bound by the evidence of the experts which is to a large extent advisory in nature. The court must derive its own conclusion upon considering the opinion of the experts which may be adduced by both sides, cautiously, and upon taking into consideration the authorities on the point on which he deposes,” the bench observed.
“The hospitals are institutions, people expect better and efficient service, if the hospital fails to discharge their duties through their doctors, being employed on job basis or employed on contract basis, it is the hospital which has to justify and not impleading a particular doctor will not absolve the hospital of its responsibilities,” the bench observed.
The doctors held guilty are — Dr Mukherjee, Dr Halder, Dr Abani Roy Chowdhury and Dr B Prasad besides the AMRI hospital.
–Agencies