Sir, –The neurosurgeon Steven Young's column (Opinion, November 3rd) can be summarised as follow: The medical practitioners in Ireland are expected to practice 21st-century medicine in austerity-driven chaos and the limited resources of the early 20th century. Their misery in doing so is further enhanced by 19th-century laws and legal practises that benefit only such practitioners.
Then every one wonders why some medical graduates leave their beloved country and never want to return.
– Yours, etc,
ASAM ISHTIAQ FRCSI
Co Waterford.
Sir, – Steven Young (Opinion, November 3rd) states that before last year’s landmark ruling on medical consent by the UK supreme court in the Montgomery case, the manner and extent to which the risks of a procedure were explained to a patient were left to the discretion of the treating doctor.
This is not true. Both the UK’s General Medical Council and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) had, for years, in their professional guidance on consent, approximated the prudent patient standard, advising doctors to provide information that the patient would want to be given.
A case heard in recent years in our High Court held that the “reasonable patient test”, which requires full disclosure of all material risks by the doctor, is the preferable test to be adopted on the issue of patient consent.
The new Royal College of Surgeons guidelines published last week are consonant with previously published professional guidance and legal precedent. They will not “heap more misery” on the medical profession for they do not substantially change anything. A “higher barrier for consent” has not been set. If surgeons will only talk to their patients and continue to disclose all material risks to them (in all forms of treatment, not just operative surgery) they will have nothing to fear from lawyers.
– Yours, etc,
DOIREANN O’MAHONY
Law Library,
Dublin 7.