Law Commons^™

Medical Malpractice As Murder? Using Root Cause Analysis As A Guiding Framework For Criminal Medical Malpractice, Kinsey Novak Booth

West Virginia Law Review

Unprecedented criminal prosecutions for medical errors have increased throughout the nation: A Tennessee nurse was charged with reckless homicide for an isolated medication error; two South Carolina nurses were charged with criminal neglect for failing to change a wound dressing for just two days; and an Ohio pharmacist was charged with involuntary manslaughter for failing to detect that a solution contained too much sodium. Introducing criminal charges for cases of typical medical malpractice, which are most often the result of system failures, will dismantle hospitals’ error-reporting systems and lead to long-term catastrophic results for patient safety. This Note applies system …

Systemic Failures In Health Care Oversight, Julie L. Campbell

Georgia Law Review

Hospitals are intentionally shirking their duty to identify and report incompetent medical practitioners, and it is causing catastrophic injuries to patients. Why are hospitals doing this? Two decades of health care reforms have changed the way physicians and hospitals interact in the U.S. health care system, and as a result, the traditional health care oversight tools no longer work to ensure physician competence. With three out of four physicians now employees of hospitals or health care systems, hospitals have become the guardians of both the internal and external warning systems designed to flag incompetent practitioners. As the guardians, hospitals are …

Taiwan's Medical Injury Law In Action, Chih-Ming Liang, Robert B Leflar, Chih-Cheng Wu

Emory International Law Review

Taiwan’s healthcare system, lauded internationally for its universal insurance coverage, moderate costs, and high quality of care, has one significant group of detractors: its physicians. Overworked, squeezed financially by the nation’s global budgeting system’s annual payment restrictions, and oppressed by both criminal prosecutions and civil malpractice actions, doctors and hospitals raised criticisms that culminated in legislative reforms enacted in 2017 and 2022. Are the reforms making any difference?

This Article offers the first comprehensive examination in English of how Taiwan’s medical injury law works. The Article is based on interviews with judges, attorneys, physicians, scholars, and other citizens, literature reviews, …