Criminalising Medical Malpractice

The criminalisation of healthcare malpractice has become a highly topical and somewhat controversial question in recent years. Studies have demonstrated that in England and Wales, the trend towards holding healthcare professionals to account for malpractice is rapidly growing, abolishing the deference doctors enjoyed decades ago. The changing attitude of judges to claims for clinical negligence has been well documented. The role of the criminal process in England and Wales has been less fully analysed with the criminal law playing a very limited role until recently in the regulation of poor healthcare practice. In contrast, in France, the criminal process has for a long time been invoked more readily to respond to cases of healthcare malpractice, which involved even mere errors. This book compares English and French criminal law responses to healthcare malpractice and considers what lessons the French model can provide for potential reform in England and elsewhere. The book takes the HIV-contaminated blood episode as a primary example of the different approaches France and England have in dealing with healthcare malpractice. Kazarian emphasises the impact of rules of substantive criminal law and criminal procedure on the way in which healthcare malpractice is criminalised in a given country. This book explores the key lessons to be drawn on whether the criminal process is an appropriate means to respond to instances of healthcare malpractice. It proposes that features of French criminal law and criminal procedure might be useful to counteract healthcare malpractice.

This textbook is about the law of medical malpractice and how to prevent a malpractice lawsuit. It grew out of an earlier book covering medical negligence in Singapore. The book's primary goal is to provide a clear and simple explanation of the American law of medical malpractice, informed consent and risk management. Written with the clinician in mind, it is legally uncomplicated without being overly simplistic. The book is as much about medicine as it is about law; above all, it is about patients. It is written with the fervent belief that with better education, there will emerge a better appreciation of the expectations of the patient — often unmet — and the standards of the legal system — often misunderstood. Fewer lawsuits and improved patient care will hopefully follow.The book is in five sections. The first covers the law of malpractice and informed consent while the second covers risk management with chapters on confidentiality, communication and risk management tips. Section III is a single chapter on reforming the system, and discusses both medical and legal proposals. The subject of tort reforms is covered in this chapter. A review section consisting of 35 multiple choice questions and answers constitutes Section IV. The book concludes with a glossary of legal terms.

This monograph is the most comprehensive comparative law study of legal responsibility arising from medical care presently available. It is written for doctors as well as health care administrators and legal professionals. Focusing on the problems of civil liability, it presents the development, points of contact with, and differences between the modern law of medical liability stemming from both the Common Law and Civil Law traditions of England, Scotland, Eire, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, South Africa, France, Belgium, West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. It demonstrates the extent to which both problems of medical law and trends towards their solution are already familiar in these legal systems. The work describes principles and trends, not by confronting the reader with national reports' and separate chapters on different legal systems; rather, the relevant legal problems are analyzed from an integrative, comparative viewpoint. The main thrust of the presentation is the analysis of numerous court decisions -- the number of which is rising ominously in the United States -- on the civil liability of doctors and hospitals for damages arising from substandard treatment or inadequate disclosure of information to the patient. References to the legal and medical literature, indexes, and a refined system of cross-references, together with an important collection of appendices covering legal and ethical declarations make this work accessible as a handbook and reference work for the legal and social problems encountered today in the wide area of law, ethics, and medicine.

"Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethical areas? What effect, positive or negative, does the use of criminal law have when regulating bioethical conflict? And can the law accommodate moral controversy? By exploring criminal law in theory and in practice and examining the broad field of bioethics as opposed to the narrower terrain of medical ethics, it offers balanced arguments that will help readers form reasoned views on the ethical legitimacy of the invocation and use of criminal law to regulate medical and scientific practice and bioethical issues"--