Clinicians and health risk managers could avoid court and maximise patient care if they took greater note of judicial decisions, according to Geraldine Hickey, a partner in solicitors McCann Fitzgerald in Dublin.
Ms Hickey was speaking at the first in a series of health sector seminars by McCann Fitzgerald and Public Affairs Ireland.
The courts were taking a patient-centred approach to informed consent, she said, whereas for years it was commonly thought that doctors need not warn of risk or complications where the risk was less than 1 per cent.