Introduce Medical Injury Compensation Bill (draft of letter to be sent) To Sh Ravishankar Prasad Minister of Law and justice Shastri Bhawan A wing Dr Rajendra Prasad Road New Delhi Sir **************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************** Doctors in India today feel demoralized and victyimized. There is no denying the need for accountability of doctors and all other professionals. The honorable supreme court has as you may be aware granted stay on applicability of CPA on advocates in 2009. We request you to consider removing doctors from the ambit of Consumer Protection Act by Introducing a Medical Injury Compensation Bill in Parliament. Salient features of the bill being suggested could be as follows 1) It should cover all aspects of Compensation and punishment in cases of Medical Error and injury thereof exclusively. 2) It should cover criminal negligence as defined in Jacob Mathew vs State of Punjab and Martin F Dsouza vs Mohd Ishfaq judgments 3) It should over ride all other laws currently in place. 4) Multiple avenues of litigation should be barred. All litigation on this issue should be under this Act. Currently doctors who are accused are being prosecuted by different agencies like MCI, Consumer Courts, Criminal Courts and may also now include the Authority under CEA for same issue. This leads to 3-4 different places where a doctor keeps running to on different dates trying to defend a single case of alleged medical negligence each moving at a different pace. Also sometimes when a medical board has been formed the doctor appears before this said medical board in addition. 5) Introduce a Cap on maximum compensation which can be awarded in case of medical error and injury thereof. This could be based on the fee charged for treatment. Consequent Loss of Earning of an individual should be compensated through Life and other health Insurances which all individuals should take. Earning capacity of Individual should be delinked from compensation awards since fee paid is not linked to earning capacity. A person whose life is worth 10 crores would anyway be having life insurance to the tune of 10 crores and hence accidental (may be medical accident) death would anyway recompense the nominee for the financial loss. 6) It should provide mechanism for independent expert opinion taken from experts in working in similar establishments. An expert from a tertiary care institute may view events differently from an average practicing doctor in a similar area of work. Negligence has been defined now as doing something which an average practicing doctor would not do or not doing something which an average practicing doctor would do. “The man on the Clapman omnibus” is the reasonably educated and intelligent person of ordinary skill in the profession, whose actions are what are expected by courts. 7) It should provide mechanism of penalizing complainants for frivolous complaint. The penalty so imposed should be linked to the compensation asked for and not an arbitrarily low figure. It should be sufficient to act as a disincentive for the mischievous. 8) It should provide for stringent penalty for those who indulge in violence and damage to property of medical institutions and personnel following incidences of alleged medical negligence. I request you to kindly initiate a preliminary study and discussion on this bill so that a consensus may be generated. Dr Neeraj Nagpal Convenor Medicos Legal Action Group Ex President IMA Chandigarh 9316517176 hopeclinics@yahoo https://facebook/medicoslegalactiongroup For Contributions; Medicos Legal Action Group Ac No 499601010036479 IFSC code UBIN0549967 Union Bank Sector 35 C Chandigarh;
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 12:23:41 +0000