Medical Services Under Consumer Law

In one line

The consumer forum is where medical claims are actually brought, and the case that put them there turned on who pays.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: medical services rendered by a practitioner or a hospital constitute a service for the purposes of consumer protection legislation, so that a patient is a consumer and may proceed before the consumer fora rather than by ordinary civil suit, except where the service is rendered free of charge to every patient, or under a contract of personal service; and the decisive question in the exceptions is who bears the cost, not where the treatment was given or whether the practitioner is a member of a regulated profession.

Why the law has this at all

The civil action described in [Medical Negligence: the Civil Action] is sound in doctrine and unusable in practice for most patients. A suit takes years, requires court fees on the amount claimed, and demands expert evidence the claimant must fund in advance. A patient with a claim worth a modest sum has a right and no way to enforce it, which is the asymmetry problem in [Remedies When Technology Causes Harm].

Consumer legislation was designed for exactly that gap: a cheaper forum, a simpler procedure, a three-tier structure, and no requirement to pay court fees proportionate to the claim. Whether it reached medicine was contested, and the profession's argument was not absurd: a doctor is not a shopkeeper, treatment is not a product, and a bad outcome is not a defective good.

The case

Indian Medical Association v. V.P. Shantha, AIR 1996 SC 550, (1995) 6 SCC 651, decided on 13 November 1995 by Kuldip Singh, S.C. Agrawal and B.L. Hansaria JJ.

Facts. A group of matters raising whether, and when, a medical practitioner or a hospital renders a service within section 2(1)(o) of the Consumer Protection Act 1986. The Indian Medical Association argued that practitioners, being members of a profession subject to the disciplinary control of the medical councils, fell outside the Act, and that in any event their services were rendered under a contract of personal service, which the definition excludes.

Held. The Court set out twelve conclusions. The essential ones are these.

The general rule. Service rendered to a patient by a medical practitioner by way of consultation, diagnosis and treatment, both medicinal and surgical, falls within "service" as defined, except where the doctor renders service free of charge to every patient or under a contract of personal service.

Professional regulation is no answer. That practitioners belong to the medical profession and are subject to the disciplinary control of the medical councils does not exclude their services from the Act. Discipline and consumer liability run in parallel, which is the fifth column identified in [What Medical Law Is].