The Hindu : Front Page : 'Doctors not criminally liable for careless act'

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Friday, Aug 06, 2004

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'Doctors not criminally liable for careless act'

By J. Venkatesan

NEW DELHI, AUG. 5. The Supreme Court has held that a doctor will not be criminally liable if a patient dies due to an error of judgment or carelessness or for want of due caution though he can be liable to pay compensation.

A Bench, consisting of Justice Y.K. Sabharwal and Justice D.M. Dharmadhikari, gave this ruling while quashing the criminal proceedings against Suresh Gupta, a plastic surgeon, facing trial on criminal charges of causing the death of a person during surgery for removing a nasal deformity in April 1994.

The Bench said that for fixing criminal liability on a doctor or surgeon, the standard of negligence required to be proved should be so high as could be described as "gross negligence" or "recklessness." "It was not merely lack of necessary care, attention and skill."

"When a patient agrees to go for a medical treatment or surgical operation, every careless act of the medical man cannot be termed "criminal." It can be termed "criminal" only when the medical man exhibits a gross lack of competence or inaction and wanton indifference to his patient's safety and which is found to have arisen from gross ignorance or gross negligence. Where a patient's death results merely from an error of judgment or accident, no criminal liability should be attached to it. Mere inadvertence or some degree of want of adequate care and caution might create civil liability but would not suffice to hold him criminally liable."

The judges said that criminal prosecution of doctors without adequate medical opinion pointing to their guilt would be doing a great disservice to the community at large because if the courts were to impose criminal liability on hospitals and doctors for everything that went wrong, the doctors would be more worried about their own safety than giving the best treatment to their patients.

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