Editor—The points raised by Bishop in his personal view on the negligence of medical experts are important and often ignored by doctors until they directly affect them.1 Medicolegal reports usually deal with what turns into a sentinel event in a doctor's practising life. Reports need to be fair to patients but also to doctors.
Consideration needs to be given to issues of report writing.
Firstly, reports should be written by those in similar current clinical practice for a minimum of eight to 10 years.
Secondly, some training in the legal aspects and in the interpretation of data is needed.
The person writing the report must be careful not to use too much retrospective analysis. Events need to be considered with the level of knowledge available to the doctor at the time of the event
An understanding of data and literature interpretation is important2
Medical and legal communication is different. Doctors write for meaning, relying on context, sentence, and paragraph structure to provide the setting for meaning, but they are loose with individual words. Lawyers choose individual words very carefully and are less concerned about flow and readability.
The importance of these reports is not to be underestimated, but their quality is unknown. Clinical medical practice is aided by applying evidence based medicine. The legal system has no such tool.
The legal profession require us to provide quality information. If reports are inadequate then so will be its judgment.
Competing interests: None declared.
References
- 1.Bishop MC. The negligence of medical experts. BMJ 2004;329, 1353. (4 December.) [Google Scholar]
- 2.Sagar PM, Hartley MN, Mancey-Jones B, Sedman PC, May J, Macfie J. Comparative audit of colorectal resection with POSSUM scoring system. Br J Surg 1994;81, 1492-4. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]