The lack of patient safety and healthcare quality has severely impacted the vulnerable populations in our country and in order to effect improvement we must come together to make relevant changes.
Judy Ham
Cerebral Palsy of Colorado, Executive Director
If you are harmed while receiving health care treatment (as hundreds of thousands of patient are, every year), your options aren’t great. You generally have to hire a lawyer and go to court to sue your doctor or hospital, assuming you can find one who is willing to take your case. Most Americans don’t realize how difficult it is to find a lawyer, particularly if you are older or your income is low. If you do sue, it can be expensive and very time consuming.
Studies have shown time and again that the current legal system not only fails to provide reliable, timely compensation to injured patients, but is also a substantial barrier to improving communication between doctors and patient safety authorities. Multiply this experience many times over and you get a picture of a system that doesn’t work well for most patients. Indeed, many patients look to the legal system to provide a voice for the injured, hoping to draw attention to the need for vast safety and quality improvements. Yet the lengthy and convoluted process can often silence those efforts and leave patients disillusioned with the legal process.
Few patients are compensated. If you are injured during medical treatment, you deserve to be compensated quickly and fairly. But our current legal system makes this extremely difficult:
- The average medical injury claim takes 5 years to resolve, and few victims receive payment.
- Even when medical injury claims are successful, nearly 60 cents of every settlement dollar goes towards legal fees and court costs. We must do better at ensuring that more of the money spent on resolving claims goes to the patients and families who need it.
- Some attorneys won’t take certain cases. If they deem an injury too minor or if you are retired or your annual income is low, lawyers might reject the case because it costs more to litigate than what can be recovered.
- Fear of being sued keeps doctors and other health care professionals from sharing valuable information about errors and near misses that could prevent future injuries. As a result, system-wide learning from the mistakes of other doctors is slow and the same kinds of errors happen over and over again. Communication amongst physicians is essential to making safety improvements, and preventing future errors.
- Medical lawsuits have made it harder for competent doctors in higher risk fields to stay in practice, with obstetrics and emergency medicine being especially impacted.
- Doctors afraid of being sued practice “defensive medicine,” ordering unnecessary tests and procedures. These unnecessary tests and procedures add to the costs we all pay and sometimes even put patients at greater risk.
