The field of products liability is a large and specialised area of legal practise. In the context of perioperative medicine, products liability is concerned with the following questions:

1. Who is liable when a faulty product is alleged to have caused harm to a patient?

2. Can a defendant in a case of negligence claim that faulty equipment contributed to the harm caused to a patient?

ETHICS

In spite of developments in the law to protect consumers against negligence, highly publicised cases arising from the use of defective products (e.g. silicon breast implants, Bjork–Shiley heart valves) have brought pressure on successive governments to reform the law concerning products liability.

A key turning point came with the Thalidomide tragedy of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thalidomide was marketed as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women, but hundreds of babies worldwide were born with varying degrees of phocomelia or abnormally developed limbs, as an unforeseen side effect of the drug. As the tort of negligence relies on demonstrating fault and foreseeable harm, it was very difficult for claimants at the time to recover damages against manufacturers. Naturally, these events gave rise to considerable public concern. There was an understandable perception that a great injustice had been perpetrated in these circumstances, without any possibility of the injustice being righted or prevented by the law.