European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

PROBLEMS FACED BY RESIDENT DOCTORS WHILE HANDLING MEDICO-LEGAL CASES IN CASUALTY

*Dr. Bedanta Sarma, Dr. Shreemanta Kumar Dash, Dr. Arun kumar S. and Dr. Senthil Kumaran M.

ABSTRACT

Whenever a patient is brought to hospital, the first duty of the attending doctor is to give him reasonable care to save his/her life. Confusion arises whenever medicolegal cases are brought, whether treatment should be given first or the legal formalities should be prioritized. Many a time, physicians try to avoid such cases simply because of its medicolegal nature. According to them, if they accept the cases; they need to visit judiciary system. Hence, they will always maintain a distance with police and all the legal systems. Because of this taboo, many doctors working in private establishments refer the patient to a nearby government hospital even if they have best infrastructure to handle the patient. This can simply be described by lack of practical orientation regarding medicolegal cases among themselves. In this paper, we tried to highlight few common confusion/problems regularly faced by resident doctors working in busy casualty centers and try to describe those in logical manner.

Keywords: Medicolegal cases, judiciary.