[The obstetrical ultrasonographer and the law. Toward a medical consensus in prenatal diagnosis].
Ultrasonographers are being held to account more and more often. They are blamed for failures in diagnosis, and in particular "for false negatives". Having been taken off its pedestal, our profession seems now to have been put into the dock by a population that equates the right to treatment (encouraged by our health assurance system) with the right ot a cure and with duty by the medical profession to provide a mean to achieve the cure and good results. All forms of imaging of diagnostic interpretation are particularly vulnerable to the misunderstanding of the rights of the patient. The doctor's responsibility in civil law can be invoked when he has made a mistake, and when that mistake results in injury to the patient or her infant and where there is an obvious causal link between the mistake and the injury. The injuries that can be said to arise in the field of antenatal diagnosis are very broad-ranging, as the cases described in this article show. Comparisons between the state of affairs in France and in North America are made. The following can be involved: death of the fetus or of the newborn, emotional trauma for the parents, loss of opportunity, which is a "new" injury accepted several times since 1965 and now brought up more and more often in civil actions. This loss has not yet appeared in the penal system.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Nisand
I
I
CMCO-Schiltigheim, Strasbourg.
Maugis
E L
EL
D003951:Diagnostic Errors; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007603:Jurisprudence; D008318:Malpractice; D011247:Pregnancy; D011296:Prenatal Diagnosis / Q000639:trends*; D014463:Ultrasonography; D014481:United States
L'échographiste obstétrical et le juge. Pour un consensus médical en diagnostic anténatal.