Patient Safety and Medical Malpractice
Patient Safety and Medical Malpractice
This chapter shows that despite all the national attention on the issue of medical errors, surprisingly little progress has been made in implementing error reduction systems. This is partly because meaningful financial incentives for health care providers to adopt patient safety measures have been lacking. In principle, tort liability could provide such incentives, but not as it is currently structured in the medical field. And under the best of circumstances, tort liability is only one of several policy instruments that can be applied to make medical care safer than it is now. The threat of a lawsuit would presumably deter such errors, but there is empirical evidence that such errors are widespread, and some experts even argue that medical malpractice has been counterproductive in achieving the objective of reducing medical error rates.
Keywords: medical errors, error reduction, patient safety, tort liability, medical malpractice
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