Hospital Liability Law explores the area of law known generally as "hospital liability," the duties and responsibilities a hospital owes to its patients, and the theories under which a hospital may be held liable, including negligence; lack of informed consent and/or informed refusal; unauthorized treatment which may lead to a cause of action for battery; breach of privacy for the unauthorized release of a patient's medical record; and breach of contract. This almanac also discusses the responsibility of the hospital for the actions of its employees, including physicians, residents, interns, nurses, hospitals, mental health professionals, anesthesiologists, and other persons who provide medical care. This almanac examines the elements necessary to prove the various theories of liability that support a prima facie hospital malpractice claim, the defenses to such claims, the litigation procedures unique to medical malpractice, the responsible parties and apportionment of liability, and the damages recoverable. The Appendix provides applicable statutes, resource directories, and other pertinent information and data. The Glossary contains definitions of many of the terms used throughout the almanac.

This volume presents, from an international legal perspective, research on the legal liability of hospitals in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. It describes and explains the following grounds or theories which establish liability in the legal systems of the various countries: - indirect or vicarious liability; - direct or primary liability; - liability in terms of the non-delegable duty; - breach of contract; and - doctrines invoking liability. Detailed discussion of case law - including cases involving such related areas as the liability of airlines, shipping companies, and other groups - shows how the different grounds in various countries' legal systems are successfully applied. The Legal Liability of Hospitals will be of great value to practising lawyers, law students and teachers, and health care management officials.

Medical responsibility lawsuits have become a fact of life in every physician’s medical practice. However, there is evidence that physicians are increasingly practising defensive medicine, ordering more tests than may be necessary and avoiding patients with complicated conditions. The modern practice of medicine is increasingly complicated by factors beyond the traditional realm of patient care, including novel technologies, loss of physician autonomy, and economic pressures. A continuing and significant issue affecting physicians and the healthcare system is malpractice. In the latter half of the 20th century, there was a major change in the attitude of the public towards the medical profession. People were made aware of the huge advances in medical technology, because health problems increasingly tended to attract media interest and wide publicity. Medicine is a victim of its own success in this respect, and people are now led to expect the latest techniques and perfect outcomes on all occasions. This burst of technology and hyper-specialization in many fields of medicine means that each malpractice claim is transformed into a scientific challenge, requiring specific preparation in analysis and judgment of the clinical case in question. The role of legal medicine becomes more and more peculiar in this judicial setting, often giving rise to erroneous interpretations and hasty scientific verdicts, but guidelines on the methodology of ascertainments and criteria of evaluation are lacking all over the world.The aim of this volume is to clarify the steps required for sequential in-depth analysis of events and consequences of medical actions, in order to verify whether, in the presence of damage, errors or non-observance of rules of conduct by health personnel exist, and which causal values and links of their hypothetical misconduct are involved.​

This is a comprehensive reference text that examines the current state of Legal Medicine, which encompasses Forensic Medicine, in the 21st century. It examines the scope of both legal and forensic medicine, its application and study and has adopted a wide ranging approach including multinational authorship. It reviews the differences between and similarities of forensic and legal medicine, the need for academic qualification, the applications to many and varied fields including international aid, military medicine, health law and the application of medical knowledge to both criminal law and tort/civil law, sports medicine and law, gender and age related factors from obstetrics through to geriatrics and palliative care as well as cultural differences exploring the Christian/Judeo approach compared with that within Islamic cultures, Buddhism and Hinduism. The book looks at practical applications of legal medicine within various international and intercultural frameworks. This is a seminal authoritative text in legal and forensic medicine. It has a multi-author and multinational approach which crosses national boundaries. There is a great interest in the development of health law and legal medicine institutes around the world and this text comes in on the ground floor of this burgeoning discipline and provides the foundation text for many courses, both undergraduate and postgraduate. It defines the place of legal medicine as a specialized discipline.​

v. 1. Research findings -- v. 2. Concepts and methodology -- v. 3. Implementation issues -- v. 4. Programs, tools and products.

This book brings together some of the most respected Asian and Australasian experts on medical liability to provide insightful perspectives on civil and criminal law from selected Australasian jurisdictions. It focuses on the idiosyncrasies of the existing law and case law in this part of the world with regard to medical liability, adopting a comparative and critical perspective. The aim is to provide an overview of the basic elements of medical liability in Asian and Australian jurisdictions, as well as the latest developments and general trends in jurisprudence. Given the broad range of jurisdictions covered, the book offers lawmakers, health administrators and practitioners, both in law and medicine, an alternative approach to the delivery of health care. Further, it is essential reading for all those (academics, lawyers, judges, researchers, practicing doctors and those involved in the growing area of legal medicine) working in medical liability, specially in the Australasian context.

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.