Civil Liability of Medical Institution
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Lin, Hsing-Yi
Abstract
With the rapid change of social development, the role of medical institutions as health-care providers has evolved significantly over the past decades. Many studies found that today’s medical institutions are directly implicating in most of harmful medical errors; however, medical malpractice litigations and its doctrinal substructure are still heavily oriented toward holding individuals liable for medical injuries, and doctrines that contemplate the role of organizations still gain little attention. In order to conform the increased role of medical institutions, Taiwan’s legal system needs to figure out civil liability of theabovementioned as central providers of health care.
In American and British laws, hospital can be held liable under either of two theories, vicarious liability and corporate liability, which were both heavily affected by the changing status of hospitals. Vicarious liability is based on Respondeat Superior whereby the hospital’s liability is answerable for those torts committed by its employees; therefore, it cannot solve the disputes creating from the fault of organization. Thus, there is no negligence of individual members. Anglo-American law creates “corporate liability” to deal with organizational or system failures, thus improving patient safety to fill this gap in medical malpractice,
Taiwan’s legal system lacks similar concepts to solve the same problems. No matter Civil Code Article 188, Article 28 or Article 244, they all focus on negligence of nature person, and ignore the importance of medical institutions.
To deal with medical malpractice, the author believes that the most important question is what kind of view better serves justice. The doctrine of corporate liability imposes upon medical institution an independent, affirmative, and non-delegable duty to provide quality medical care. Therefore, an injured party does not have to rely on and establish the negligence of a third party. Thus, the plaintiffs do not need to find out the wrongdoers except the medical institution itself; namely, the imposition of corporate liability provides an easier source of compensation for the injured compliant. Furthermore, the threat of corporate liability is a useful and positive tool that gives medical institutions great incentives for self-monitoring and diligent, careful operation. After embracing the doctrine of corporate liability, the author discusses different duties of medical institution and breach of these duties. In addition,, the author also borrows this tort concept to apply to contract liability of medical institutions, thus establishing comprehensive protection of patient safety.
The current conflicts between patients and doctors have led to a rethinking of the relations between Taiwan’s health care and civil justice systems. This is the time to renovate our system of liability to design it better suit a new world dominated by medical institutions. The “corporate liability” model the author has introduced and developed is precisely constructed for this purpose.
Subjects
Medical institution
Corporate liability
Vicarious liability
Civil Code Article 188
Civil Code Article 28
Civil Code Article 224
SDGs
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