Medical Negligence Claims in Sri Lanka

What are medical negligence claims really about? Although the legal definition of “medical negligence” involves the failure of healthcare service providers to exercise a standard of due care, empirical findings from a qualitative case study set in Sri Lanka demonstrate that medical negligence claims do not straightforwardly represent the same concern. This is primarily because each such claim is a singular episode which is caught in the midst of a dynamic dispute journey and is, therefore, part of a larger process involving its participants’ understandings of, explanations of, and responses to healthcare experiences. Thus, a close scrutiny of the emergence, formulation, generation, processing, and outcomes of medical negligence claims exposes extraneous and ambiguous concerns. In the process, basic assumptions about medical negligence claims beg our reconsideration. For instance, it is not always the case that grievances emerge from socio-economically privileged parties, that grievances are about failures in applying clinical standards, that claims are driven by money-hungry victims, that approaching a particular claims forum is an informed choice, or that the processing and outcomes of claims focus on assessing/judging/ improving healthcare standards. In this context, the book explores and explains the complex presence/ absence of concerns about healthcare service standards within the medical negligence claims landscape in Sri Lanka. The analysis also contains comparative findings from other jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and India.