Alcohol-related presentations may arise across urgent care, emergency departments, primary care and referral pathways. Claims often turn on whether clinicians identified relevant risk, documented the patient’s presentation adequately, escalated concerns appropriately, and considered alternative diagnoses where alcohol use may have obscured the clinical picture.

The session will focus on missed opportunities to identify alcohol misuse, misattribution of symptoms, delayed diagnosis of underlying conditions, triage and prescribing decisions, documentation and referral issues, and the causation challenges that arise where alcohol misuse complicates breach, prognosis and outcome.

You will gain a clearer understanding of how alcohol misuse can affect clinical reasoning, diagnosis, escalation and referral decisions, and how these issues may appear within the medical records.

The webinar will also consider how symptoms can be wrongly attributed to alcohol use, how this may delay investigation of underlying pathology, and where expert evidence is likely to be most important when assessing breach and causation.

Crucially, it will highlight common dispute points between clinicians and experts in alcohol-related clinical negligence claims, including documentation, safeguarding, communication, prescribing and referral decisions involving vulnerable patients.

This session will help you to:

• Understand how alcohol misuse can affect clinical reasoning, diagnosis, escalation and referral decisions
• Identify missed opportunities in the records where alcohol-related risk should have been recognised or acted upon
• Assess how misattribution of symptoms to alcohol use may contribute to delayed diagnosis of underlying conditions
• Strengthen analysis of breach and causation where alcohol misuse complicates the clinical picture
• Improve review of documentation, triage, prescribing, safeguarding and communication issues in vulnerable patients
• Appreciate common dispute points between clinicians and experts in alcohol-related clinical negligence claims