L’expertise médicale judiciaire ou menée dans le cadre d’une procédure devant les Commissions régionales d’indemnisation des accidents médicaux

Abstract

The medical expert assessment practice has become an essential action in the medicine practice, keeping up to this pace, that doesn’t shrink, the calling into question of doctors and the first of them, the surgeons. So-called amicable measure in the context of lead in a compensation commission procedure or investigatory measure in the context of the article 145 of the Civil Procedure Rules, the medical expert assessment is a decisive procedural change in the lawsuit which has been brought against a doctor. It judges the question using scientific and understandable terms for the judge in charge of settling the dispute in a legal procedure or to deliver an opinion in a CRCI amicable procedure, giving it the look of a pre-trial. Indeed, it is the only way to provide a true translation of the medical event in financial terms and to answer questions and compensation requests made by claimants. In response to this evolution, the medical expert assessment has become a matter of specialists whether they are experts or judges or lawyers or medical advisers or insurers. It requires for the incriminated doctor's a preparation to an anticipated, well-structured and well-organized defense. In addition to the challenges related to the file, the medical expert assessment is not immune to the vagaries as it is necessary affected by the parties’ behavior and the nature of the questions asked or avoided and the expert's personality and the lawyer's ability to manage these uncertainties. The defense leeway and the opportunity to respond to the objections raised or to submit arguments, remain intimately linked, of course, to the reality of the file, but fundamentally to the further legal debate which stay in the line of sight at each step of the expert assessment procedure.