Health Care Law

Health Care Law

Introduction

The practice of hiring professional doctors and hospital staff as apparent employees provides an advantage to the hospitals as it safe both the hospital and doctor in the case if doctor gives wrong treatment to the patient. This type of contracts is very common in the health sector in the Europe and private hospitals uses this contracts in its favor (Rathke, 2008). In this subject report we discuss this issue mentioned in the article named as “The Doctrine of Apparent Authority in Medical Malpractice cases”. This article is very effective in describing this issue with the example of many cases in which in one case instead of doing case on the hospital due to proving wrong treatment to the patient, court rejects this case by saying that the affected person has no proof that the target or pointed doctor treats him because the doctor is an apparent employee of the hospital whose record is not present. According to the apparent employee contract, the doctors or hospital staff hired through that contract is not considered as the hospital staff. Instead of this, they do their job independently in the hospital without any involvement of hospital. Therefore, hospital is also not responsible for any mistake of this staff. As a result of this apparent employee hiring practice, only patient suffer (Furniss, 2007).

Discussion

Summary

The doctrine of apparent authority has many issues and problems in medical malpractice cases. The staff of the hospital including doctors, surgeons, and even nursing staff is hired as apparent employees on contract basis that provides an advantage to the hospital as well as for the staff in case of any mishap in the medical treatment provide to the patients. The apparent contract is a contract that allows the hospital to hired staff on private responsibility basis; it means that doctors and nurses hired on this contract are responsible for any lapse in treatment they are providing to the patients. This practice will make hospital administration free from any responsibility of wrong treatment if these doctors or staff gives to the patient. Another point this article focus is that the patient admitted in the hospitals or going for treatment in the hospitals are not updated by the hospital administration with this information and they only know about this when any mishap is done by the authorities and patients are even unable to do any case due to practice of Doctrine of Apparent Authority.

The cases discussed in this article are enough to describe the bad image of doctrine of apparent authority. The first case discussed by the author in this article is the case of Brassil in which the person Mr. Wolf on which the case is done is the physician of hospital and give wrong diagnosing an abdomen disease and also providing wrong treatment to the patient. In this case, when the patient did case on the authorities of hospital and Mr. Wolf, then court after hearing this course details, gives their decision in favor of doctor ...