THE DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP POST-COVID

EDITOR’S FOREWORD: RE-EVALUATING THE DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP IN THE POST-COVID ERA: INSIGHTS FROM TORT LAW   
Dr Mélinée Kazarian, University of Southampton 

COMPENSATING PATIENTS FOR COVID-RELATED MEDICAL ACCIDENTS IN FRANCE: PROTECTING THE DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP?  
Simon Taylor, University of Paris Nanterre

The French out-of-court settlement scheme for medical accidents enables around 1,500 victims of medical accidents per year to obtain compensation, irrespective of whether the medical service provider was at fault. This article considers how this scheme applies to Covid-related medical accidents in France. It also asks to what extent recourse by patients to a medical accident compensation scheme of this type can contribute to protecting the doctor-patient relationship, principally by ensuring a much less acrimonious means of compensation than through traditional litigation. The article concludes by asking what lessons can be learned from the French model for the compensation of Covid-related medical accidents in English law.

NAVIGATING THE UNCHARTED TERRITORY: EXPLORING THE LIABILITY OF HEALTH PROFESSIONALS FOR COVID-RELATED DAMAGE  
Dr Mélinée Kazarian, University of Southampton

This article offers a critical analysis of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on clinical negligence claims in the UK, emphasising its significant implications for both legal and healthcare sectors. It investigates how traditional negligence principles were applied in the context of a pandemic that introduced unprecedented challenges, including resource constraints, staff shortages, and a shift to remote consultations. The article highlights that, contrary to initial concerns, there has not been a notable increase in negligence claims following the pandemic, largely due to factors such as patient empathy, court backlogs, and legal time limits. The evaluation of NHS Resolution indemnity schemes reveals their crucial role in shielding healthcare professionals while addressing patient compensation, yet underscores their limitations and high costs. This comprehensive examination provides essential insights into how legal precedents may evolve post-pandemic, and stresses the urgent need for reforms to enhance care quality and safety. By shedding light on these issues, the article contributes valuable perspectives to ongoing discussions like the Covid-19 Inquiry and offers guidance for future crisis management and legal preparedness.

THE PURPOSE OF INFORMATION DISCLOSURE BEFORE AND AFTER THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A MEDICAL RELATIONSHIP IN FLUX  
Dr Matthew Watkins, Barrister, Bournemouth University

The Supreme Court’s judgment in the case of Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board gave a clear indication that ‘informed consent’ had at last crossed the Atlantic. For the purpose of consent, information was no longer at the discretion of individual medical practitioners, but instead was required to meet the needs of the actual patient, their values, and circumstances. This manifest in the requirement to disclosure of risks, benefits, and reasonable alternatives. This level of choice recasts the patient as a consumer of medicine and doctor as provider of tailored treatment and information services. Whilst this clear recognition of rights to understand and choose treatment potentially mitigated medical paternalism, it has since become a nexus of conceptual and legal confusion about the wider purpose of information disclosure as part of a (supposedly) therapeutic relationship. This article will argue that this legal pathology is far from unique. In other jurisdictions (from whence the concept of informed consent was transplanted) the requirement to synergise the dual purposes of therapeutic and autonomous disclosure manifests in three distinct ways: integration, incorporation and rejection. In doing so, it suggests that the Montgomery judgment has adopted the incorporation methodology, which itself has manifest a number of pathologies, during its early application – most concerningly, the arbitrary picking and choosing of purposes to justify interpretation of duties and standards. This article suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a paradigm shift in the way that the role of medicine is conceptualised within society and that the view of the optimum form of the clinical relationship has thus come full circle: that is, medicine and its institutions should be orientated towards the therapeutic aim of improving health. This is demonstrated socially and politically through increased trust in medical expertise, and endorsement of an indemnity scheme for negligence during the pandemic. This trust in medical expertise has since become manifest in law, through the limitation of the consumer relationship, and the endorsement of the beneficent aims of the doctor- patient relationship, in cases such as McCulloch.