Breach of Duty

Answer:

The other day, a young gentleman came to my office. He believed he had a medical malpractice claim against his doctor. We were discussing his case and he wanted to know what a breach of the doctor’s duty was. I explained to him that a duty is an obligation for the doctor to act like any other doctor would under the same conditions. For example, we had a case where a man went into the ER. He was complaining of shoulder pain, upper back pain, and shortness of breath. The shortness of breath with the shoulder pain should have been enough to put any reasonable emergency room doctor on notice to test his heart for a heart attack. However, they did not do that and 36 hours later, the heart attack went undetected and, unfortunately, the man died. That’s a situation where a reasonable doctor should’ve seen the shortness of breath and immediately ordered the test to see if he was having a heart attack. In that case, the doctor did not do that and that would be a breach of his duty of care.