The legal ramifications of practice guidelines—developed for the evaluation and improvement of patient care—are mostly unknown. They have the potential to be either beneficial or damaging if you are involved in an adverse medical event. Most guidelines outline general practice, so how they are interpreted in specific situations will determine how they are applied in legal matters.
Individuals considering malpractice claims can use practice guidelines to inform their decisions. Guidelines that were followed may serve to discourage merit-less claims at the outset, preventing litigation. However, guidelines may also prompt claims if the care provided does not appear to be consistent with published practice guidelines.
Guidelines can also have a mixed role once a malpractice lawsuit has been filed. When brought up by either side’s expert, guidelines have been generally accepted by courts as evidence. They may serve as a “snapshot” of the standard of care at the time of an event, especially if the standard has changed significantly in the interim. However, guidelines can be damaging if you did not comply with them and did not record the medical rationale for the treatments chosen. Documentation of rationale and best judgments made is more important than ever.
Practice guidelines may hinder defense of a malpractice case by appearing to be definitive in areas with no genuine medical consensus, or exhaustive when in fact they implicitly allow for physician discretion. Fortunately, at this point, appropriately developed guidelines are much more likely to help improve and evaluate patient care than to come up in a malpractice claim.