ArticleCureus2026
Awareness of Medico-Legal Case Management Among Saudi Board Emergency Medicine Physicians in Riyadh: A Multicenter Cross-Sectional Study.
Article in Cureus, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundEmergency physicians frequently manage cases with legal implications. Accurate documentation, evidence preservation, and compliance with reporting requirements are essential, yet awareness of these duties may be incomplete.
objectiveTo describe awareness of medico-legal case management among Saudi Board Emergency Medicine physicians in Riyadh and explore associations with demographic and professional characteristics.
methodsThis multicenter cross-sectional study included emergency medicine residents, specialists/registrars, and consultants from seven governmental and tertiary hospitals in Riyadh. A 10-item investigator-developed awareness questionnaire and five self-reported confidence items were administered electronically. The instrument was reviewed by five consultant emergency physicians for clarity, relevance, comprehensiveness, and clinical applicability; no pilot study, formal content validity index, Delphi process, or construct validity assessment was performed. For analysis, a "Yes" response to each awareness item was coded 1 and a "No" or "Don't know" response was coded 0, yielding a 0-10 index. Investigator-defined cutoffs of 0-3, 4-7, and 8-10 were used to label poor, moderate, and good awareness, respectively; these cutoffs have not been externally validated. Descriptive statistics, univariable tests, and multivariable linear regression with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors were used.
resultsOf 576 submitted questionnaires, 276 incomplete submissions were excluded, and 300 complete responses were analyzed. The mean awareness index was 6.31 ± 1.59 (median, 6; observed range, 1-10). Correct responses varied across the 10 awareness items, ranging from 56.3% to 71.3%, with the lowest proportions observed for photographic documentation and legal consequences of failing to report suspected medico-legal cases, and the highest for workplace evidence-collection protocols. Internal consistency was low (Cronbach's alpha = 0.097), indicating that the awareness index should be interpreted as an exploratory summary of heterogeneous medico-legal domains. In the adjusted model, compared with consultants, R4, R3, and R2 residents had lower awareness scores, while managing two to five medico-legal cases per shift was associated with a slightly higher score than managing fewer than two cases. Previous report-writing training was not independently associated with awareness.
conclusionPhysicians demonstrated variable awareness across different medico-legal knowledge domains. As the investigator-developed awareness index demonstrated very low internal consistency, the overall score should be interpreted cautiously as an exploratory summary rather than a validated measure of a single construct. Future studies should prospectively validate a multidimensional instrument and evaluate competency-based medico-legal education.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.