Select medicolegal terms and definitions
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Medical law or health law | An area of law, which can be construed broadly to pertain to medicine and healthcare, including confidentiality, negligence, termination of treatment, and torts in the practice of medicine and clinical care. |
| Competency proceedings | Hearings conducted to determine a person’s mental capacity. |
| Negligence | The omission to do something that a reasonable person would do, or the doing of something that a reasonable and prudent person would not do. The failure to use such care as a reasonably prudent and careful person would use under similar circumstances. Actionable negligence involves the breach or nonperformance of a legal duty; essential elements are duty, breach, proximate cause, and harm. |
| Malpractice | Professional misconduct or unreasonable lack of skill. Failure of one rendering professional services to exercise that degree of skill and learning commonly applied under all the circumstances in the community by the average prudent reputable member of the profession. |
| Medical futility | Varies by jurisdiction and may be fact-specific. There is no overarching, agreed-upon legal definition. |
| Medical directive | A document that expresses a patient’s wishes regarding various types of medical treatment in several different situations where the patient may become incapacitated and thus unable to make or communicate such decisions on their own. This document can grant a power to make medical care decisions to another by means of a power of attorney, healthcare proxy, or living will. |
| Surrogate medical decision-maker | A person empowered by a medical directive, statutory law, or a court of competent jurisdiction with making medical decisions for a patient who lacks decision-making capacity. |
| Implied consent | Consent that is not expressed and manifested by explicit and direct words but is gathered by implication or necessary deduction from the circumstances or from the conduct of the parties. One example is an adult patient with decision-making capacity who voluntarily offers his arm to a healthcare provider for a vaccination. |