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Whenever the court tries to decide who might be held liable for a given injury, it seeks to determine the extent to which the responsible party had been saddled with a specific duty of care. In the eyes of the law, any adult has been given a duty of care towards the other members of society. Adults that fail to exercise their duties have become negligent, and can be held liable for a given injury.
When a business rather than a person has been negligent
A business does not have a one-on-one relationship with every customer. Yet that does not free it from specific duties. A pill-maker has a duty-to-warn. It is expected to issue any needed warning about any one of the company’s products.
A failure to warn could be viewed as an unwillingness to accept a duty to warn. In other words, the courts could view that failure as an act of negligence. Still, it would not be the only way by which the same company might be held negligent.
That pill maker might have demonstrated negligence by carelessly agreeing to an unsafe design on a pill bottle. Alternatively, the same pill manufacturer might have shown negligence in the degree of oversight placed on the workers within the manufacturing plant. In a similar manner, the plant-head might have neglected to establish a good means for maintaining an adequate level of quality control.
What a court would accept as evidence of medical liability?
The court would study the side effects possible, following the ingestion of one specific drug. Had customers been made familiar with those same side effects? If the side effects had been listed or announced, a liability charge could not be placed on the plant that manufactured the pills with specific side effects.
Did the manufacturer know of other dangers, besides the listed side effects? For example, could a skin cream hurt the eyes, if it were used on the eyelids? A manufacturer that knew of such dangers but failed to share information about the same dangers might one day be held liable for an eye injury. That would certainly be the case, if the customer with eye damage had been deprived of facts about the dangers that surrounded the cream’s use, in the region of the eyelid.
How dangerous is this one product? Suppose a customer tries to use it for a purpose that has not been mentioned on the product’s label, what will happen? If such use could pose a danger to a customer, then that fact should be shared with consumers.
By the same token, a company can make claims about the safety of alternate uses. For example a certain diabetes drug could have been designed to keep the user’s blood glucose reading at an acceptable level. If that same drug can also help the user to lose weight, then that fact should not be hidden from consumers. If someone has been a victim of medical negligence, they need to consult with an injury lawyer in North Bay to get more guidance.