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Physician Duties Regarding Clinical Care

Learn about a physician’s duty not to abandon a patient and the duty to comply with the medical standard of care.

Transcript

The existence of a physician-patient relationship places legal duties on the physician. A physician’s duties to keep a patient’s information private and to get informed consent are covered in a separate lesson. In this lesson, we’ll look at a physician’s clinical-care duties not to abandon a patient and to provide a certain standard of medical care.

I. Duty Not to Abandon a Patient

A physician has a duty not to abandon a patient. Once a physician-patient relationship is formed, a physician has...