Opinion ID: 2590180
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: It Was Error to Require D.P. to Present Expert Testimony as to the Breach of a Duty of Care.

Text: The general rule in medical malpractice actions provides that the jury ordinarily may find a breach of professional duty only on the basis of expert testimony. [5] The primary limitation to this rule is that expert testimony is not needed in non-technical situations where negligence is evident to lay people. [6] D.P. relies on this exception. The defendants rely primarily on cases discussing whether the health care provider failed to recognize the suicidal or elopement tendencies of the patient or failed to order appropriate precautions. [7] These cases, however, are distinguishable from the present situation because D.P. does not allege that defendants failed to appreciate her mental health status, to recognize a risk of harm to her, or to order reasonable precautions. She instead faults the defendants' failure to follow the ordered precautionary measures. It remains far from clear that D.P.'s case should be viewed as a medical malpractice action. Most courts characterize cases in which the plaintiff alleges a failure to adequately supervise and safeguard the patient as involving ordinary negligence issues. [8] Further, in Alaska, medical malpractice actions are governed entirely by statute. [9] Alaska Statute 09.55.536(a) sets forth specific procedural requirements for medical malpractice cases. Under this section, either the parties must submit a malpractice claim to arbitration or the court must appoint an expert advisory panel within twenty days of the answer to the complaint. Neither occurred here. Moreover, the superior court recognized that the parties had failed to treat the action as one for medical malpractice. [10] In Clary Insurance Agency v. Doyle, [11] we distinguished between medical malpractice issues and those involving ordinary negligence: Not every act of a professional requires an instruction on the professional standard of care. Meier v. Ross General Hospital [12] illustrates the point. Meier involved a wrongful death action by the widow of a suicide victim who had jumped through an unbarred second story window of a hospital. The court concluded that the case supported instructions on both ordinary negligence and medical malpractice. Issues relating to improper medical diagnosis and chemotherapy treatment required an instruction on the professional standard of care. But the court concluded that an instruction on ordinary negligence was appropriate on the question of whether it was negligent to allow the decedent, who was depressed and had previously slashed his wrists, to wander freely around a hospital where there were no bars on the windows. [13] The defendants unpersuasively rely on Nally v. Grace Community Church of the Valley [14] to distinguish Meier. In Nally, a young man who received informal pastoral counseling committed suicide. [15] Nally simply declined to extend a duty of care to personal or religious counseling relationships in which one person provided nonprofessional guidance to another seeking advice and the counselor had no control over the environment of the individual being counseled. [16] In view of the numerous authorities holding that a jury may readily determine whether patients known to be a risk to themselves have been adequately supervised, we hold that D.P.'s claims do not raise strict medical malpractice issues requiring expert testimony. [17] Whether the hospital exercised reasonable care in supervising D.P. represents a factual question for the jury's resolution under an ordinary negligence framework. We therefore hold that it was error to require D.P. to present expert testimony regarding the hospital's alleged breach of its duty of care.