Mediation For Medical Malpractice: Why Doctors Should Embrace It
Mediation has been cited as a way to lower the cost of litigation and compensate injured patients without going through the ordeal of a trial. In a post from the WSJ Health Blog, the problem is that few doctors are participating.
That’s a problem. A study from a law journal looked at 31 cases that went to mediation and found that,
of those cases, 16 were settled at mediation, 5 settled afterward and 10 weren’t settled. While defense attorneys were less likely to agree to mediation than plaintiff attorneys, lawyers who did participate reported satisfaction with the process, as did “plaintiffs, hospital representatives and insurers,” the study finds.
The authors write that in no cases did physicians participate in the mediation.
Many times, patients resort to suing their physicians simply to find out what happened. In a recent post here, attorney Brian Nash provided perspective from the legal standpoint, and in the comments (now 150+ strong), you can see the dissonance between the malpractice viewpoints of the physician, attorney, and patient. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
