Pattern of Medico-Legal Cases in a Tertiary Care Hospital in Kumaon Region

The Casualty department of any tertiary care center should always be equipped and trained to handle all kinds of cases brought to it. For this purpose, it is necessary to know the pattern of medico-legal cases brought to it and make corresponding preparation to deal with them. Every doctor in the casualty should decide first whether to mark a case Medico-legal or not, otherwise, there will be an unnecessary burden on the hospital staff and local police too. This study can guide those doctors too to deal with and differentiate between alleged medico-legal cases and actual medico-legal cases. This study is a retrospective study of 3380 cases to know the pattern of medico-legal cases brought to the casualty of Government Medical College, Haldwani, Nainital during the period of 1^st January 2021 to 31^st December 2021. In our study, there was a predominance of males(2421 i.e.,71.62%) in most of the medico-legal cases over females(959 cases i.e., 28.37%) with a ratio of 2.52:1. The most affected age group is 21-30 years(1113 cases i.e., 32.92%) followed by 31-40 years(897 cases i.e., 26.53%). Road traffic accidents account for most medico-legal cases(1067 cases i.e., 31.56%) followed by Assault by blunt weapons(938 cases i.e., 27.75%). Most of the medico-legal cases came in the month of September(369 cases i.e., 10.91%) followed by December(352 cases i.e. 10.41%) with the least cases in the month of April(217 cases i.e. 6.42%).