Medical malpractice is a broad category of claims involving medical profession. It involves cases against doctors, nurses, hospital administrators. And basically what we are trying to do is determine whether or not the physician acted reasonably under the circumstances. Medical malpractice is again a broad category of potential claims. But when we talk about medical malpractice involving a physician, what we’re talking about is when a physician fails to act reasonably under the circumstances. The law recognizes that a physician does not have an obligation to be perfect, they don’t have an obligation to practice medicine with a crystal ball.
Rather their obligation is to simply act as the reasonable physician would under the circumstances. Now you should realize that that obligation is not unique to physicians, all individuals in conducting their everyday lives have a similar obligation of reasonableness. So if you are an accountant or an architect or an engineer, you are going to have a similar obligation of acting reasonable when dealing with your client so that no harm comes to them.
Now that same obligation is true when you are talking about a plumber or an electrician or any type of trade’s person. Those individuals also have that same obligation of reasonableness when they’re conducting their every day profession. So for example a plumber when putting in the plumbing in your house has an obligation to do that in a reasonable fashion so that no harm comes to those individuals that are inside the house.