Civil liability of non-physician staff towards patients from the perspective of comparative law

Due to the expansion of the duties of the medical profession, the resulting responsibilities, both civil and criminal, have taken on different dimensions. This study aimed to investigate the civil liability of non-physician staff towards patients from the perspective of comparative law.

 In this study, Law articles about internal and foreign laws in the information databases of the judiciary and reputable information sources such as Google scholar, Scopus, SID, Web of Science during 2010 to 2021 (for English articles) and 1390 to 1400 (for Persian articles) were searched. Boolean operators of or and were used along with the relevant keywords in the article search.

 In this descriptive-analytical review study conducted in 1400, the keywords "medical staff", "physician", "patient", "comparative law", "civil liability" were searched in valid databases. A total of 250 articles and 5 e-books were retrieved. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria (year of authorship, relevance, access to article texts and non-duplication), 23 articles and 3 e-books were studied and reviewed. Finally, the general rules of civil liability of medical staff were extracted.

In the Iranian legal system, the civil liability of medical staff is based on fault with the effects of compensation. American and British jurists have accepted civil liability in the form of coercive guarantees. But French law, in addition to this liability for fault, also accepted liability without fault, which resulted from a harmful act.

The main purpose of civil liability is to compensate the damage in full and try to put the victim in a position before the damage occurs. Therefore, the first method of compensation is objective compensation. The second method is to give a parable if possible, and in the last step, to give a loss of cash.