skills in aesthetic medecine

A clinic must be secure of its surgeons skills

by Droit-medical.com, on Tuesday 25th of august 2009

In a ruling of June 11th, 2009, the first civil appeal chamber of  the Court of Cassation took a decision favorable to a patient who blamed a private medical clinic for not having supplied her with qualified staff during an intervention of plastic surgery (appeal n 08-10642).It is not  the nurse or the stretcher-bearer who were accused in this affair, but  the  surgeon himself.

In 2003, the patient decided to be operated for an artificial breasts in a private clinic of the Pas-de-Calais.Therefore,  she refered to  a specialist in breast cancer and gynecology who worked there.Unfortunalty, the result didn't reached the expectations of the patient who decides then to take the clinic and the surgeon to court .She blamed the establishment for "negligence in its general obligation of organization" which imposes  to supply  qualified personnel ".This  because the surgeon was registered in the  order board  as "general surgeon" and that he was not specialized in plastic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgery.The arguments of the clinic based on the experience and the practice of the surgeon, on the appeal to a recruitment agency which had cheked his diplomas,as well as on the examination of the contract linking him to the medical board  were not sufficient to convince the Court of Cassation.For them, by decree of July 11th, 2005, the clinic missed its duty towards the patient by letting a surgeon do a plastic surgery operation  without having checked his skills in this medical field and in spite of the fact that the exercise of plastic surgery was restricted to a specialists list only after the litigious facts.