Health Administration Responsibility: The loss of opportunity

When all the diagnostic tools available that could have guided the patient's diagnosis and determined its study and treatment have not been used, and the patient situation reaches an irreversible state, then we face the "loss of opportunity".

The loss of opportunity has been embraced in case law as an alternative to the breach of "lex artis", and  allows for a compensatory response in cases where the latter failure has not occurred, however it exists an unlawful damage arising from the operation of the service.

In this case we cannot ever know what would have been the end result, even if all available diagnostics possibilities had been exhausted .

In these cases, the material damage doesn't correspond to the fact occurred , but to the uncertainty surrounding the sequence that could have taken the facts should the medical service had followed other performance parameters, in short, the possibility that the circumstances concurrent had occurred in a different way.

The loss of opportunity is the loss of an alternative treatment, which resembles somewhat to the moral damage, and that is the concept to compensate.

We can state that medical action deprived the patient of certain expectations of healing, which should be compensated , but reducing the amount of compensation due to the probability that the loss occurred equally, having acted diligently.