Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I am Professor Anurag K Agarwal and I am a faculty at the IIM Ahmedabad and also the faculty chair for the Executive Education Programme, Medico-Legal Issues in Healthcare Management. This programme is aimed for doctors and other medical professionals both working in government hospitals and private sector hospitals. This also aims for policy makers and other people who are involved as patients or patient groups and others who may have agreements or a grudge against the medical professionals. The purpose is not to create a divide between the service providers and the people who are getting the medical professional services but to bridge the gap between the two of them through proper communication as there have been several issues which have been raised in the last decade or so or we can say for the last let's say three decades since the Consumer Protection Act of 1986 came into work in the country. It has been really a turbulent time when the Consumer Protection Law brought the doctors and other medical professionals under its ambit and there have been a number of cases filed in the courts. Now there are several other issues which are related besides this law and at times the medical professionals both administrators as well as the doctors are at the receiving end. Several of such laws date back to maybe even 200 years back with the basic principles of contract law, principal-agent relationship, vicarious liability and coming to today's scenario when the role of state has expanded and talked about the Good Samaritan Law where everyone is supposed to provide the basic attention in health care whatever one can do in those circumstances to anyone at any place. Now this is a big big sort of duty and it's extremely difficult for anyone to do that. At times in a country like India with teeming millions of people 1.3 billion to be sort of we are counting every day. Now the point is that there is a huge gap between what service is being provided to the people and their aspirational level. Agreed that in the western world and in the developed world the level of medical care and services provided can be far better as the infrastructure and other facilities are much more when compared to India. But it doesn't mean that in India an egalitarian society committed to rule of law where we have said in the constitution that everyone is equal and everyone should get equal protection of law and also whatever the state can provide the best of what one can achieve to rise to the fullest of its potential that is the purpose and for that primary basic medical health care is essential. It is of utmost importance not only that India is a country which is seeing medical tourism where patients from far and wide are coming to India to get treatments which are so expensive in their own country they are particularly the developed world and they are coming to India to get the world-class facilities and treatment at maybe one-tenth the cost. India is a place where at times it is said people are very litigious and for even small things people can go to the court of law. To a certain extent we can agree to that because the doors of the courts are always open in India and even people can file public interest litigation where they are not getting enough from the state which has been provided in the constitution or other the state's mandate. So it is important to understand where the divide is and how can we have that thin dividing line between the duty of a medical professional and hospital administrator and what the privileges and what rights the patients and the families have. At times because of poor communication between the two parties there are heated arguments which often result in media trial and cases also linger on for decades in courts of law. The purpose of this executive education program is to bring different actors from different parts medical professionals, hospital administrators, consumers and others at one platform and discuss more importantly to understand what are the nuances of the developing and highly evolving law on the medical legal framework. This is a time when we really need to have a judicious blend of the rights of the patients and the rights of the doctors both taken together to understand in which direction we are moving. So the purpose of this five-day executive education program is to talk about the recent developments in judicial pronouncements particularly in India and also talking about in certain other parts of the world particularly the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and other places and also talk about how the law has evolved and what have been the problems faced by hospital administrators and medical professionals. What they can do to steer clear from the controversies and from the long arm of law. It is not to say that we are going to provide something that you can do illegally, no that's not the purpose. The purpose is to know the finer aspects and the boundaries of the legal domain that is going to have everyone in the proper perspective so that proper decision making can be done at the right time. All the other details for the program are available on the website ima.ac.in where you can log on to the executive education website and find all the details about the program. Thank you very much.