Health care Course work

Question

#1: Discuss how physician malpractice suits can be decreased. How can a doctor be sued for malpractice? What current practices do doctors perform in order to avoid lawsuits? What are the impacts of these practices? How can one check for any malpractice suit against a doctor?
#2: Evaluate why prescribing, control, and administration of medications is a major area of legal concern for health care providers. What is the impact of medication errors on the patient and the health care provider? Discuss ways doctors make mistakes in prescribing medication. What kinds of errors do nurses make regarding the administration of medications? Review the documentary Chasing Zero (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. and, in addition to conducting your own research, address the methods or practices that you feel would be most effective in reducing medication/prescribing errors.

Answer

Physician Malpractice

Question #1

Physician malpractice lawsuits are a common risk for practitioners. In recent settings, these lawsuits arise more from a point of misunderstanding and poor communication than due to actual medical errors. Consequently, practitioners have to concentrate on synchronizing or strengthening their communication and interaction skills with patients and other practitioners in addition to focusing on exquisite clinical delivery (Hogan, 2003).

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Firstly, physicians must effectively review their charts and evidence when dealing with a case and making a diagnosis. This extends to the process of selecting and executing a treatment plan and eventually monitoring it to gauge effectiveness. Other steps include following up with their patients and ensuring that patients continuously understand any instructions or directions. Finally, it is essential to become courteous and develop listening skills (Pozgar, 2011). Adaptation to the electronic health records is as imperative as constantly seeking to understand new technological procedures in the field. Medical malpractice lawsuits and sued practitioners can mostly be identified from a state search of medical licensure. By establishing a system in which a physician is able executes their clinical and non-clinical requirements, the risk of lawsuits is reduced and the potential for a strong career is boosted.

Question #2

The tasks of prescribing and dispensing of drugs have developed into an area of legal concern and uncertainty. Particularly, the growth of e-prescription continues to trigger more controversy even in the current context characterized by calls for health reform. Most of the legal issues surrounding e-prescription are related to the transmission of controlled substances (Beck, 2010). Primarily, this is extremely expensive due to additional features for identity proofing, authentication and software application. This increases the risk of wrongful prescription due to alert fatigues or even people who can cheat the system and obtain controlled substances.

Furthermore, direct contactbetween patients and practitioners has been largely severed due to the onset of the era of e-prescription, and this situationcreates room for many errors, some of which can be fatal. Doctors and nurses are increasingly become prone to mistakes in terms of both quantities prescribed and complete mix-up of drugs between patients (Hanson, 2010). Prescription errors tend to be very destructive as they bear health repercussions for the patients as well as legal or career damages for the practitioners. In order to deal with these risks, many institutions prefer to slowly adopt e-prescription while maintaining traditional prescription systems. This way, physicians can slowly adapt to reforms in a way that enables them to identify many present or potential gaps before online systems are fully implemented.

References

Beck, M. (2010). The doctor will never see you again; Physicians can boot patients for unruly behavior, drug abuse and other reasons, but must follow rules. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from the ABI/INFORM database.

Hanson, M. (2010). RNs and LPNs want to be heard on changing roles: Is the state board changing rules, or just clarifying them?Star Tribune, B.3. Retrieved from the ProQuest database.

Hogan, N. (2003). Unhealed Wounds: Medical Malpractice in the Twentieth Century. New York: LFB Scholarly.

Pozgar, G. (2011). Legal Aspects of Health Care Administration. Burlington: Jones & Bartlett Publishers.