The use of doctors

According to The Lawyer, the Law Society is about to ‘clamp down on the whimsical use of doctors’ by publishing joint guidelines with the Association of British Insurers and the British Medical Association defining the circumstances in which lawyers can refer claimants in personal cases to doctors. It appears that doctors have complained that some solicitors are taking up too much of their time by advising clients to see their doctor in order to obtain a note of their injury. Doctors say their role is to treat patients, not merely to record injuries. Concerns were raised in a Cabinet Office paper Reducing General Practitioners’ Paperwork with a view to minimising the number of referrals to GPs for the sole purpose of recording an injury, which it estimates results in 202,000 appointments and 5,000 hours of GPs’ time being wasted each year. A spokeswoman said the Law Society believed it is wise that lawyers should err on the side of caution because certain injuries, such as whiplash, do not evince themselves until later on and failure to see a GP at the time of the accident could result in allegations that the injuries were not serious at the time and that the injuries that subsequently appeared were not related to the accident.