Online opinions and their medico-legal considerations
Location
Woodward Centre (10th Floor, Melbourne Law Building 106)
About
“Hi Brains Trust!”
We’ve all been there — scrolling through social media.
You come across a case that somebody has posted to a group, asking for help. It could be with diagnosis, treatment planning, or asking how to perform a particular procedure. Like most health professionals, you want to help your colleagues. So you go ahead and give your opinion. “I’d give Clindamycin.” “Do an apicectomy.” “If MB2 is too small to find, it's too small to cause pain.”
You know absolutely nothing about the patient, limited information about the tooth, and very likely no idea about the level of training, ability or resources of the dentist seeking an opinion.
Now imagine that dentist decides that your advice is best, and the patient then suffers a complication as a direct consequence of that dentist doing precisely what you recommended. What if this complication was a consequence of the dentist’s inability to understand what they were being instructed to do? What if your advice was based on faulty information provided by the original poster? What if your advice isn’t considered ‘best practice’?
Where does your liability begin and end when you decide to remotely involve yourself in someone else’s treatment planning, decision making, and treatment?
This lecture will discuss the implications of informal consultations in healthcare, exploring where the law stands on our liability towards patients we have never met, and regulatory consequences surrounding non-clinical conduct.
We’ve all been there — scrolling through social media.
You come across a case that somebody has posted to a group, asking for help. It could be with diagnosis, treatment planning, or asking how to perform a particular procedure. Like most health professionals, you want to help your colleagues. So you go ahead and give your opinion. “I’d give Clindamycin.” “Do an apicectomy.” “If MB2 is too small to find, it's too small to cause pain.”
You know absolutely nothing about the patient, limited information about the tooth, and very likely no idea about the level of training, ability or resources of the dentist seeking an opinion.
Now imagine that dentist decides that your advice is best, and the patient then suffers a complication as a direct consequence of that dentist doing precisely what you recommended. What if this complication was a consequence of the dentist’s inability to understand what they were being instructed to do? What if your advice was based on faulty information provided by the original poster? What if your advice isn’t considered ‘best practice’?
Where does your liability begin and end when you decide to remotely involve yourself in someone else’s treatment planning, decision making, and treatment?
This lecture will discuss the implications of informal consultations in healthcare, exploring where the law stands on our liability towards patients we have never met, and regulatory consequences surrounding non-clinical conduct.