How have the courts treated a physician’s chart?

In part, to consider this issue, we must look Dr. Pinder’s chart and how he created that chart. The court in Waap v. Alberta at para. 10 said [citations excluded]: ... [T]he law accords a special status to contemporaneous chart entries. Hospital records, including physicians’ and nurses’ notes can be received in evidence as prima facie proof of the facts stated therein. The case law allows a court to conclude that the absence of contemporaneous chart entries at crucial points permits the inference that nothing was charted because nothing was done. However, this is neither a rule of law nor an automatic conclusion: it is an inference which may only be drawn if supported after a careful weighing of all the evidence. See also Finch at para. 20. Importantly, the Waap court continued at para. 11, the medical practitioner “is entitled to tell the court what the notes mean to him, to testify about his usual practice, and if he has an independent memory of events, to give the evidence.”