ABSTRACT
The claimant has to show that the defendant not only owed him or her duty of care, but also that the defendant breached the duty. The duty of care is a duty to take reasonable care not to cause damage to the claimant. As a nineteenth-century judge put it, ‘negligence is the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided upon those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do’. The ‘Bolam Test’ is used in cases of professional negligence. It states that a professional is not negligent if he or she has acted in accordance with a practice accepted as proper by a responsible body of professional opinion. The Bolam test is closely associated with clinical negligence, but the same approach is applied in other areas of professional negligence.
