The Role of Plastic Surgery in Limb Reconstruction
When a severely injured limb is going to be saved rather than amputated, the biggest job is often only just beginning. Restoring working skin, muscle and blood supply over exposed bone, repaired vessels or fixed fractures, sometimes across several operations, is what plastic surgery in limb reconstruction actually involves, and it is frequently where the […]
Medicolegal Challenges in Paediatric Plastic Surgery and Reconstruction
A child who is injured today will be a different size, shape and person by the time the claim is ready to settle. That single fact separates paediatric plastic surgery from adult work more than any difference in technique. A scar that looks well placed on a seven year old can sit in the wrong […]
Facial Trauma in a Medicolegal Context
A broken cheekbone and a broken wrist are both fractures, and they are not judged the same way. Facial trauma sits across two heads of loss at once. It changes how somebody eats, breathes, sees and speaks, and it changes the face other people respond to. Separating those two effects, and working out how much […]
How Correcting a Facial Deformity Is Judged Medicolegally
Correcting a facial deformity is a different category of surgery to elective cosmetic enhancement, and it’s judged by a different medicolegal standard. Where an aesthetic procedure is chosen to change a normal feature, deformity correction addresses something objectively identifiable, a cleft, a post-traumatic asymmetry, the result of disease or its treatment, and that distinction runs […]
Patient Expectations and BDD in Facial Cosmetic Surgery Claims
A facial cosmetic surgery claim doesn’t always involve a surgical error. Some of the most difficult cases involve a technically competent procedure that left the patient genuinely unhappy, because what they expected going in was never realistic, and nobody caught that before surgery happened. In short: patient expectations are central to facial cosmetic surgery claims […]
Informed Consent Failures in Plastic Surgery Claims
Most plastic surgery negligence claims that succeed aren’t really about the surgeon’s hands. They’re about the conversation that happened, or didn’t happen, before the patient ever went into theatre. Informed consent failures are one of the most common grounds for a claim in cosmetic and reconstructive surgery alike. In short: informed consent isn’t satisfied by […]
Plastic Surgery Negligence Explained
Plastic surgery negligence is when a surgeon’s care falls below the standard reasonably expected of a competent practitioner in that specialty, and that failure causes harm. It’s a legal test, not simply a judgement about how a result looks. Being unhappy with an outcome isn’t the same as being a victim of negligence. Working out […]