Yes Thinkfast, unfortunately we live in a very litiginous society, and clinicians are sometimes sued even when they DIDNT do anything wrong.
The answer to your question, though, lies within the concept of
standard of care. Standard of care refers to the level of care that should be delivered by clinicians in your specialty. Was the standard of care breached? Obvious examples of a breach of standard of care would be things like unrecognized esophageal intubation (which, with all our monitoring available today, would be hard to do), inappropriate management of hemodynamics, like resultant renal failure from persistent, untreated hypotension, etc. The lawyers ask themselves, how would a similarly trained clinician have handled this problem?
The problem with the system, however, is that there is a plethora of lawsuits filed by plaintiff attorneys, even when there is no real breach of standard of care. They can do this because of 2 reasons:
1) Malpractice companies will sometimes "settle out of court" for some monetary amount, with no admission of guilt. Remember that lawsuits are expensive to defend, even if the clinician did nothing wrong. Settling out of court is bad for the clinician when nothing was done wrong because it goes on your "record" and must be reported when you renew your malpractice insurance, and can lead to increased premiums or even denial of coverage.
2) There are "hired guns" (doctors) in every specialty, willing to testify to just about anything for the $500.00 per hour they charge.
This occurs in all specialties, not just anesthesia. One has to know the "style" of their malpractice company. Many reputable malpractice companies will not settle out of court if they are convinced nothing was done to breach the standard of care.
Our country is in dire need of tort reform to stop the needless lawsuits that leads to spiraling malpractice premiums, among other things.
ThinkFast007 said:
Hey guys, thanks for your posts! I'm an MSIII and I had some of the very same feelings as the originial poster.
But this is also a concern. What if (God forbid) a pt dies. And it turns out that it was an anesthesia problem. However, you did everything in your power/ability to resuscitate the pt and followed the appropriate 'protocol'. Could you still get sued (well I guess anyone can get sued but will they win the case?). Obviously a 'guilty' conscious is something one must learn to live with, but what are the legal ramifications?
Thanks again. And yes I know none of you all are JDs but a little insight would help