Overview
Healthcare institutions are responsible for the quality of care that is provided within their settings. Institutions need to ensure that the healthcare professionals they employ have a strong working knowledge of ethics and law to be competent and successful. A qualified professional knows how to provide safe, quality healthcare to a population of culturally diverse consumers. To address the needs of all patients, institutions can adopt models such as shared decision making, where patients are encouraged to share their preferences and needs with providers. On a daily basis, healthcare institutions must ensure that ethical dilemmas involving patients and providers are addressed.
Under certain circumstances, healthcare institutions and the professionals employed by the institutions can be sued by patients for negligence or malpractice.
For the Final Project of this course, you will analyze a court decision in which a hospital was found vicariously liable on a theory of apparent authority for professional malpractice in the form of negligence of an independent contractor. You will focus on facts pertaining to the medical standard of care, breach of care, and causation, and explain how they were applied to law. You will then use the facts of the case to identify an ethics issue and determine an ethical theory that would help provide a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient. Next, you will apply a clinician–patient shared decision-making model to describe how the ethics issue could be resolved. You will also include a discussion about possible violations of the code of ethics in your given field. Lastly, you will augment or vary the facts of the case to create a hypothetical scenario that changes the outcome so that the hospital is no longer vicariously liable for professional malpractice in the form of negligence of an independent contractor.
Prompt
In this project, you will analyze a court case involving medical malpractice in the form of negligence. Using your analysis of the case, you will address the facts pertaining to the medical standard of care, breach of care, and causation. Further, you will use the facts from the original case to identify an ethics issue, determine an ethical theory that would help provide a safe and quality healthcare experience for the patient, apply a clinician–patient shared decision-making model, and augment or vary the facts of the case to change the outcome.
You will analyze the following case for your Final Project:
- Popovich v. Allina Health System
Specifically, your case study must address the following critical elements:
- Recommendations: In this section, you will utilize the knowledge you gained from your malpractice and ethical analyses to recommend and defend strategies that would help improve medical practices and avoid future liability.
- Recommend preventative strategies the healthcare provider could implement to avoid liability in the future.
- Defend how your recommended preventative strategies would assist the healthcare provider in avoiding liability and provide a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient.
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