Clinical negligence in the high developed economies: the legal standpoint and numbers

Insurance companies work with the patients who suffered medical errors in the United States for more than one hundred years. Insurance payment is automatically included in the insurance program, and the amount of payment depends on the nature and consequences of medical errors and by court decisions. The relevant section of the law called the medical malpractice. It provides an analysis of what may be a medical error and what mistakes are punishable under criminal law. So, doctors are subjected to criminal liability have made errors which ‘led to dysfunction of the human body or death’. This is where we can recollect the case of Michael Jackson and his doctor allegedly prescribed the wrong dose of medication. This dose provoked Jackson’s death, and the doctor was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. Adopted in 2010, the amendments to the Medical Malpractice require all hospitals of the country to report medical errors committed by these institutions through the press. ‘Our people need to know exactly what happened. Each case is a disaster’, said Robert Galvin, the head of a law commission on medical mistakes of Connecticut Department of Public Health. According to statistics, every year the US courts receives 1,500+ complaints about medical errors, and three-quarters of these cases are satisfied by the courts. The average amount of compensation to the affected patients in recent years ranged between $313,000 and $521,000. Now doctors are lobbying for the introduction of new rules that would limit the size of such payments. (more…)