Medical Errors

Medical Errors

Running head: Legal and Ethical implication

Touro International University
Charmaine Williams
BHS 499 Senior Capstone Project
MODULE 3 Session Long Project
Professor Dr. Mihaela Tanasescu, PH.D
The complexity of managing medical errors has been rooted in the legal consequence of malpractice lawsuits. While only a few major medical errors result in malpractice suits, medical error prevention strategies are driven by the principal to practice with in legal boundaries. According to Weinstein (2006), the only way to combat the increase of liability many medical facilities and individual practitioners face, as a result of medical errors, is to improve patient safety and elimination of all medical errors. Legal guidelines regarding medical care are presented in a way to cover the multitude of potential situations, regard for certain ethical standards are often difficult match.
The Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is one such issue that addresses both legal and ethical implications related to medical care and the result of that end result of the care (Waxman, 2008). HIPAA is designed in response to meeting patient safety goals, however the restriction of communicating certain medical information could significantly hinder care and potentially lead to major medical errors (Waxman, 2008). This has left many healthcare administrators with a dilemma of justifying the counterproductive legal and ethical concepts that HIPAA is in place to protect. Healthcare administrators must be careful not to undermine the laws that enforce and assure patient safety and consequently reduce medical errors (Cornett, 2006); and the need to maintain patient trust through full disclosure of information regarding occurrence of medical errors (Luk, et al., 2008).
Poor communication has been cited as a common reason for medical errors (Sanghera, Franklin & Dhillon, 2007). Less common reasons for errors include lack of...

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