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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Litigation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Litigation. Show all posts

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Does your nonprofit have a code of ethics that works?

Mary Beth West
USA Today Network - Tennessee
Originally posted September 10, 2018

Each year, the Public Relations Society of America recognizes September as ethics month.

Our present #FakeNews / #MeToo era offers a daily diet of news coverage and exposés about ethics shortfalls in business, media and government sectors.

One arena sometimes overlooked is that of nonprofit organizations.

I am currently involved in a national ethics-driven bylaw reform movement for PRSA itself, which is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit with 21,000-plus members globally, in the “business league” category.

While PRSA’s code of ethics has stood for decades as an industry standard for communications ethics – promoting members’ adherence to only truthful and honest practices – PRSA’s code is not enforceable.

Challenges with unenforced ethics codes

Unenforced codes of ethics are commonplace in the nonprofit arena, particularly for volunteer, member-driven organizations.

PRSA converted from its enforced code of ethics to one that is unenforced by design, nearly two decades ago.

The reason: enforcing code compliance and the adjudication processes inherent to it were a pain in the neck (and a pain in the wallet, due to litigation risks).

The info is here.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Drug Companies’ Liability for the Opioid Epidemic

Rebecca L. Haffajee and Michelle M. Mello
N Engl J Med 2017; 377:2301-2305
December 14, 2017
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1710756

Here is an excerpt:

Opioid products, they alleged, were defectively designed because companies failed to include safety mechanisms, such as an antagonist agent or tamper-resistant formulation. Manufacturers also purportedly failed to adequately warn about addiction risks on drug packaging and in promotional activities. Some claims alleged that opioid manufacturers deliberately withheld information about their products’ dangers, misrepresenting them as safer than alternatives.

These suits faced formidable barriers that persist today. As with other prescription drugs, persuading a jury that an opioid is defectively designed if the Food and Drug Administration approved it is challenging. Furthermore, in most states, a drug manufacturer’s duty to warn about risks is limited to issuing an adequate warning to prescribers, who are responsible for communicating with patients. Finally, juries may resist laying legal responsibility at the manufacturer’s feet when the prescriber’s decisions and the patient’s behavior contributed to the harm. Some individuals do not take opioids as prescribed or purchase them illegally. Companies may argue that such conduct precludes holding manufacturers liable, or at least should reduce damages awards.

One procedural strategy adopted in opioid litigation that can help overcome defenses based on users’ conduct is the class action suit, brought by a large group of similarly situated individuals. In such suits, the causal relationship between the companies’ business practices and the harm is assessed at the group level, with the focus on statistical associations between product use and injury. The use of class actions was instrumental in overcoming tobacco companies’ defenses based on smokers’ conduct. But early attempts to bring class actions against opioid manufacturers encountered procedural barriers. Because of different factual circumstances surrounding individuals’ opioid use and clinical conditions, judges often deemed proposed class members to lack sufficiently common claims.

The article is here.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

After medical error, apology goes a long way

Science Daily
Originally posted October 2, 2017

Summary: Discussing hospital errors with patients leads to better patient safety without spurring a barrage of malpractice claims, new research shows.

In patient injury cases, revealing facts, offering apology does not lead to increase in lawsuits, study finds

Sometimes a straightforward explanation and an apology for what went wrong in the hospital goes a long way toward preventing medical malpractice litigation and improving patient safety.

That's what Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, and her colleagues found in a study to be published Oct. 2 in Health Affairs.

Mello, a professor of health research and policy and of law at Stanford University, is the lead author of the study. The senior author is Kenneth Sands, former senior vice president at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Medical injuries are a leading cause of death in the United States. The lawsuits they spawn are also a major concern for physicians and health care facilities. So, hospital risk managers and liability insurers are experimenting with new approaches to resolving these disputes that channel them away from litigation.

The focus is on meeting patients' needs without requiring them to sue. Hospitals disclose accidents to patients, investigate and explain why they occurred, apologize and, in cases in which the harm was due to a medical error, offer compensation and reassurance that steps will be taken to keep it from happening again.

The article is here.

The target article is here.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Episode 1: What Psychologists Need to Know about Divorce, Mediation, and Collaborative Law

In this inaugural podcast, John interviews Attorney James Demmel about divorce, litigation, mediation, and collaborative law.  Psychologists frequently find themselves working with individuals contemplating a divorce or actually going through the divorce process.  The purpose of this podcast is to give psychologists an overview of issues surrounding divorce, litigation, mediation, and collaboration.

At the end of this podcast, the listener will be able to:

1. Describe collaborative law,
2. Differentiate between collaborative law and mediation, and,
3. Describe the benefits of mediation and collaborative law.

Click here to purchase 1 APA-approved Continuing Education credit

Find this podcast in iTunes

Or listen directly here.




Resources

Link to Attorney Demmel's website

Frequently Asked Questions about Collaborative Law and Mediation

Items Needed to Analyze Marital Assets - From Demmel Law Office

Link to The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals

Link to Collaborative Professionals of Central Pennsylvania 

Listener feedback about this episode can be sent to John Gavazzi

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Learning From Litigation

By Joanna C. Schwartz
The New York Times - Op Ed
Originally published May 16, 2013

MUCH of the discussion over the Affordable Care Act has focused on whether it will bring down health care costs. Less attention has been paid to another goal of the act: improving patient safety. Each year tens of thousands of people die, and hundreds of thousands more are injured, as a result of medical error.

Experts agree that the best way to reduce medical error is to gather and analyze information about past errors with an eye toward improving future care. But many believe that a major barrier to doing so is the medical malpractice tort system: the threat of being sued is believed to prevent the kind of transparency necessary to identify and learn from errors when they occur.

New evidence, however, contradicts the conventional wisdom that malpractice litigation compromises the patient safety movement’s call for transparency. In fact, the opposite appears to be occurring: the openness and transparency promoted by patient safety advocates appear to be influencing hospitals’ responses to litigation risk.

I recently surveyed more than 400 people responsible for hospital risk management, claims management and quality improvement in health care centers around the country, in cooperation with the American Society of Health Care Risk Managers, and I interviewed dozens more.

The entire story is here.