The Doctrine of Respondeat Superior - Essay Example

They state that a clear line has to be drawn in order to establish with certainty that there existed an agency relationship between the parties for which the senior faces charges for the mistakes of the junior.Malpractice is defined as the failure to provide professional services with the skill usually exhibited by responsible and careful members of the profession, resulting in injury, loss, or damage to the party contracting for those services (Regan & Regan 2002). It is under the torch of medical malpractices that the acts of negligence are best shone on the undertakings that could be regarded as acts of negligence.

When the employee is charged with conducting the business of the employer under situations or directions not prior agreed upon with the employer or simply disallowed by the employer, the precedent is set for the master to excuse themselves from the omissions of their staff. This balance puts employers at the helm of deciding and defining their work relations with their employees.Serving as a practicing nurse, there are many responsibilities that fall on the shoulders of the incumbent in such a position.

For example, a more experienced and clearly skilled nurse is put in charge of junior staff in the nursing department. The senior nurse is by this doctrine expected to ‘carry the cross’ for the acts of omission or commission for which the juniors expose the institution to.Thornton notes that office-based physicians are frequently taken aback when confronted with the fact that they, their medical group, or their professional association may be responsible for the conduct of another in their office or practice (2010).

  This could be the result of a lack of adequate knowledge about the wide net cast by the doctrine of Respondeat Superior.To counter this problem, the senior staff is advised to encourage a management system that regularly intercepts the progress of their juniors so they may monitor their personal progress with individual patients and also solve matters relating to an ill attitude in advance.Thornton advises that the track record of every employee is necessary to keep and use as a tool to gauge their eligibility for various levels of roles in the work environment.

For this to be achieved, he foresees a situation where some errant employees whose track records have been negatively determined have to be released in order to keep a staff that is responsive to the call for non-negligent care for the patients.The rule further encompasses the role of a serving surgeon as pertains to their duties when operating on patients. (Regan & Regan) argue that such a surgeon is responsible for the staff under them including senior nurses even though they themselves hold a junior position among other surgeons.