title: Establishing breach of the duty of care in the tort of negligence.
abstract: This article, the third in a series on clinical negligence, looks at the law surrounding breach of the duty of care in negligence. It shows some of the principles that judges and lawyers use in order to decide whether a person has broken his/her duty of care in the tort of negligence. It will be seen that the principles are contained in decided court cases, some of which are quite old but are still relevant today. The focus of this article is on the rule that courts, in deciding the issue of a breach of duty of care, would judge the defendant's conduct by the standard of what the hypothetical, 'reasonable person' would have done in the circumstances of the case.
authors.affiliation: Nottingham Law School, The Nottingham Trent University.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tingle
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007884:Legislation, Nursing / Q000592:standards*; D008318:Malpractice / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D009732:Nursing Care / Q000592:standards*; D006113:United Kingdom