Book launch: Medical negligence claims from a socio political lens
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In her book ‘Medical Negligence Claims in Sri Lanka’, based on a socio-legal qualitative study set in Sri Lanka, Dr. Avanti Perera asks the question: what are medical negligence claims really about?
Although the legal definition of “medical negligence” involves the failure of healthcare service providers to exercise a standard of due care, empirical findings demonstrate that medical negligence claims do not straightforwardly represent the same concern.
This is primarily because each such claim is a singular episode caught in the midst of a dynamic dispute journey and therefore, part of a larger process involving its participants’ understandings of, explanations of, and responses to healthcare experiences.
Thus, a close scrutiny of the emergence, formulation, generation, processing, and outcomes of medical negligence claims exposes extraneous and ambiguous concerns.
In the process, basic assumptions about medical negligence claims beg our reconsideration.
For instance, it is not always the case that grievances emerge from socio-economically privileged parties, that grievances are about failures in applying clinical standards, that claims are driven by money-hungry victims, that approaching a particular claims forum is an informed choice, or that the processing and outcomes of claims focus on assessing/judging/improving healthcare standards. In this context, the book explores and explains the complex presence/absence of concerns about healthcare service standards within the medical negligence claims landscape in Sri Lanka.
The analysis also contains comparative findings from other jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and India.
The book has been previewed as being “well thought-out and thorough…and taken as a whole it makes a real and substantial contribution to knowledge of the subject” (Prof. Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford), possessing a “refreshingly new approach…mastery of the literature…clarity of exposition matched with stylish diction” (Prof. Colvin Goonaratna, Chancellor, Open University of Sri Lanka” and being “of interest not only to lawyers but also to socio-legal scholars, doctors, patient groups and others with an interest in the future of healthcare governance” (Dr. David Erdos, University Lecturer in Law and the Open Society, University of Cambridge).
Dr. Avanti Perera
The author is a Senior State Counsel at the Attorney General’s Department. She holds a D.Phil Degree in Law from the University of Oxford, a Masters Degree in International Law from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. Degree in English from the University of Colombo.
The work-in-progress of her doctoral thesis on which this book is based has been presented at seminars conducted by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University, the 20th Anniversary Conference of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law held in Spain, and the Fourth International Graduate Legal Research Conference, King’s College, London.
Dr. Perera’s extensive review of the famous medical negligence case of Prof. Priyani Soyza v. Rienzie Arsecularatne was published in the most recent Bar Association Law Journal.
She has served as a visiting lecturer at the Department of English, Colombo University and as a Graduate Teacher at the Faculty of Law, Oxford University and she is also a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society.
Justice Priyasath Dep, PC, Judge of the Supreme Court, will be the Chief Guest at the book launch on Friday, February 19 at 4.45 p.m. at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute.
Dr. Mario Gomez and Prof. Colvin Goonaratna will review the book from legal and medical perspectives respectively. The book is published by Har-Anand Publications Pvt Ltd, New Delhi.