Medicine and law
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Tribunals are often constituted by members of the legal profession. Sometimes members are appointed because of specific expertise in a certain area. The area of guardianship, being a protective jurisdiction, has aspects that make it different from other areas often dealt with by tribunals. ⋯ It raises some dilemmas as well. This paper gives a brief outline of the role of the Guardianship List of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in Australia. It discusses the experience of a Tribunal member, from a decision-making perspective and a professional expertise perspective, resulting in an ultimately unique picture that assists in achieving a necessary outcome for the benefit of the person in need of assistance.
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Informed consent is a process rather than just simply the signing of a form. It should provide the patient with the information and understanding needed to authorize a procedure. The aim of the present study was to try to understand the patient's attitude to, and understanding of, the pre-anaesthesia informed consent (IC) document. ⋯ A series of epidemiological variables, anaesthesia and surgery-associated risks (ASA) and whether the patients had undergone anaesthesia previously, were evaluated. The mean age of the study population was 55 (SD:19.63), with 36% over the age of 65, while 77% had not received secondary education. 21% of the patients who signed did not read the document and 14% found it difficult to understand. 89% found the information sufficient and 46% said they preferred to receive such information in written form. 64% had no or very little recall of the information they had been given, the proportion of those making this claim being in direct relation with age over 50 years and low level of studies. The findings suggest that improvements are needed in the pre-anaesthesia informed consent document so that, rather than serving as a mere legal prerequisite, it fulfils its purpose of providing the patient with the information necessary and in a clearly understood way so that he/she can authorize the proposed surgery.
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Comparative Study
Comparisons of the interactions of health care delivery and medico-legal practice between Australia and Singapore.
Australia and Singapore have similar standards of health care. The one major difference in the two health care systems is the cost to the patient at the point of care. The Medicare system in Australia provides partial to complete subsidy for health care delivery in the public hospitals. ⋯ Studies in the variations between two health care systems, where the costs to the government and individuals are clearly dissimilar, but the health outcomes are similar, can be educational for health law specialists. The methods in which patients obtain recompense for their grievances can help both countries understand how to determine and improve standards of health care communication. Having worked in both systems, the relative values of each and their effects on medical litigation will be discussed.
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The religious community of Jehovah's Witnesses holds that blood transfusion is against God's law. Therefore, surgical treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses is a great challenge for every surgeon, especially for cardiac surgeons because blood transfusion is frequently needed during such operations. In this study we summarize the experience with Jehovah's Witnesses who have undergone open-heart surgery in Debrecen from 1989 to 1999 due to various cardiac diseases. ⋯ Three patients out of twenty-four died during the postoperative period. The twenty-one longtime survivors showed significant improvement in their clinical stage during the mean follow up of 37.6 months. More and more operations are done successfully without blood or preserved blood products worldwide, so it could be said that nowadays surgical treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses has a lower risk than before.
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To provide ophthamologists with guidelines with which to prevent common errors of malpractice and suggest ways to reduce the risk of liability claims by improving the quality of care. ⋯ The risk for malpractice litigation for ophthalmologists may be reduced by preventing common causes of malpractice and improving the quality of care.