An Agenda for Improving Legal Claims for Medical Malpractice in Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The law and ethics of medical practice enjoy a relatively universal appeal, and speak the same language in different jurisdictions. This is due mainly to the fact that the practice of modern orthodox medicine is traceable to the Greek philosopher, Hippocrates (father of modern medicine) who brought scientific rationalization into medical practice, thus exploding the hitherto garb of metaphysics and Esoterism that beclouded the practice. The various works of the World medical Association in developing and disseminating ethical rules and standards of practice further strengthened the universal character of medical ethics. Accordingly, the right of patients and the duties of medical practitioners remain the same all over the world. But the extent to which these rights and duties are asserted, observed and enforced vary significantly among jurisdictions. Recent empirical investigation shows that in Nigeria only about 1.1% of all medical malpractice cases are enforced through legal action. This paper gives an analysis of the present state of medical practice in Nigeria in terms of the basic care exhibited by medical practitioners, the impression of patients about such care and other elementary requirements of doctor-patient relationship. It draws from a work which concludes that while the level of care is abysmally low leading to high level of malpractice, the level of legal claims is even lower. The paper proceeds to set out some legal and administrative remedial measures that could be taken to improve the almost non-existent claims against practitioners involved in medical malpractice in Nigeria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".