Medico-legal Audit: An essential yet ignored aspect of healthcare in India

Abstract

Clinical audits have become an indispensable and mandatory tool in ascertaining quality assurance in the context of health care  services. The significance of these audits is laid by regulatory bodies which prescribe the procedural format and logistics to conduct  these audits. Conventionally, medico-legal audits are often mentioned in relation to the medico-legal reports and documents such as  insurance records etc. The available literature further describes that medico-legal audits deal particularly with the formal scrutiny of  forensic case work. Medico-legal audits are an integral part of hospital/clinical audits that involves examination of all the hospital  records. The clinical audits aim towards quality improvement measures and hence are limited to the scrutiny of patient's clinical  records. On the contrary, a medico-legal audit aims at the prevention of foreseeable litigations on the hospital and thus includes the  perusal of all the hospital records. Medico-legal audits are significant whenever there is an interaction between the working of the  hospital and the law. The present article discusses the various aspects of conducting audits, their significance, aims and objectives,  limitations, variants, procedural layouts, etc.