Article 26 of the Saudi Healthcare Professions Practice Law

This article sets the nature of the healthcare practitioner's obligation toward the patient, which is a basic matter for understanding medical liability.

The text says that the healthcare practitioner's obligation is an obligation to exercise care, meaning what is required of them is to exert the due effort and care. The text does not describe it as an obligation to guarantee a particular result such as recovery.

But this care is not just any care, as the text requires two things of it:

• It must be vigilant care, not ordinary or lax care.
• It must be consistent with accepted scientific principles of the profession.

So the standard for assessing the practitioner's work is: did they exercise vigilant care according to accepted scientific principles?

Article 27 follows directly to set what follows from a breach: every professional healthcare error by the practitioner that results in harm to the patient obliges whoever committed it to pay compensation, and Article 27 lists forms of professional error, including error in treatment or lack of follow-up, ignorance of technical matters that someone of the same specialty is presumed to know, and negligence in oversight and supervision.

It is preceded by Article 25 on the duties of someone who replaces a colleague. Anyone wishing to assess whether what happened to them departed from scientific principles may consult a lawyer specialized in healthcare practice and medical malpractice cases.