Does Improved Patient Safety Reduce Malpractice Litigation?
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چکیده
I n recent years, doctors and hospitals have become increasingly committed to improving patient safety. The publication of To Err Is Human in 2000, which trumpeted the scale of preventable injuries in the nation’s hospitals, helped launch the patient safety movement and spur innovative practices and technologies to reduce such injuries. Improved patient safety should also help reduce malpractice risk for physicians and facilities, but this outcome has not yet been systematically demonstrated. A new RAND study set out to do just that. Focusing on California, it examined administrative safety data for hospitals from 2001 through 2005 and related that data to the volume of malpractice claiming, by county and by year, over the same period. The researchers found a strong correlation: When risky incidents declined in a given county in a given year, so did the number of malpractice claims originating in that county. The reverse was also true: When risky incidents increased, so did the number of malpractice claims.
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Conditions that influence the impact of malpractice litigation risk on physicians’ behaviour regarding patient safety
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SOURCE: Danzon, Medical Malpractice: Theory, Evidence, and Public Policy (1985); Harvard Medical Practice Study Group, Patients, Doctors and Lawyers: Medical Injury, Malpractice Litigation, and Patient Compensation in New York (1990); Studdart et al, "Beyond Dead Reckoning: Measures of Medical Injury Burden, Malpractice Litigation, and Alternative Compensation Models from Utah and Colorado," 33...
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