Ethical & Legal Considerations

Overview: The final case study for this course will require you to analyze a court decision in which a physician was found liable for medical malpractice. You will
focus on facts pertaining to the medical standard of care, breach of care, and causation, and you will 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 physician is no longer liable for medical malpractice.
For this milestone, you will start working on the case for Final Project I: Malpractice. Below is a link to the case you will investigate, as well as an additional article
about this case. These links are also provided in the Final Project I Guidelines and Rubric document.
 Surgery: Iturralde v. Hilo Medical Center USA
• Hawaiian jury finds doctor liable for inserting screwdriver in patient’s spine (Supplemental article)
Prompt: In this milestone, you will complete part of your analysis of the malpractice case. Using this analysis of the case, you will address the facts pertaining to
the medical standard of care, breach of care, and causation.
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
I. Introduction:
A. Summarize the case, including information on the stakeholders involved, the problem, and the time period the incidentoccurred.
II. Medical Malpractice Component: In this section, you will evaluate the case to address the legal components, the malpractice policies similar to this
case, and the standard of care given to the patient and how it was breached. Then, you will draw connections to how this malpractice case impacted
stakeholders and healthcare consumers outside of the case.
A. Explain the key legal components of the case, including the nature of the issue and the rules that applied.
B. Determine relevant malpractice policies in place for addressing the issues within the case.
C. Analyze the malpractice case for the standard of care provided to the victim. Be sure to apply what the law states about standard of care to
support whether or not it was breached in the case.
D. Analyze how the malpractice case would impact healthcare consumers from different cultural backgrounds. For example, would this case have a
similar impact on a person from a culture different from the one in the case? How could this incident change the views of these healthcare
consumers toward the healthcare system?
E. Assess the malpractice case for accountability based on its severity. To what extent was the healthcare provider held accountable?