Expert Opinion and the Rise of Consumer Representatives.

Abstract

Consumer expertise is increasingly being leveraged in health service improvement to enhance patient satisfaction and experiences of care given the disparities in consumer and clinical prioritisation of health outcomes and treatment preferences. The value of experiential expertise is slowly being discovered in legal disputes with the involvement of consumers in health complaint investigations, but consumer perspectives remain underutilised in findings of law. This article explores whether expert opinion evidence could be tendered by consumer representatives in medical litigation and whether it should be recognised to minimise perceived (or actual) injustice against patients and their carers maligned as lay people in the judicial system. This theoretical exercise concludes that experiential expertise could qualify as expert opinion evidence, and this recognition would afford greater credibility to judicial decisions in line with recognised principles of procedural fairness.