The Michigan House of Representatives recently passed a religious freedom bill that could potentially support emergency medical personnel to exercise religious objections to treating gay patients. When I first read this, my first question was, how would we even know if a patient is gay? How did this arise, and why now? I generally don’t […]
Previous articles have addressed the issue of whether a health club is required to provide an AED, and whether a “big box” store (such as Target or Walmart) is required to so.1 Although courts in general have been unwilling to find a legal duty for a business to have an AED on hand, the Florida […]
In a procedurally complicated case resulting in a 30 page opinion, the California Supreme Court found that the statute governing immunity for acts or omissions in the rendering of emergency care by use of an automated external defibrillator (AED) did not create a duty for a business to have an AED available. The case, initially […]
The question of what duty EMS has to respond to an incident before it is officially called in has come to the forefront with the Jan. 25, 2014, incident in Washington, D.C., when 77-year-old Medric “Cecil” Mills died just outside a fire station. Mills collapsed to the ground after suffering a heart attack, but firefighters […]
A recent decision from the Illinois Court of Appeals demonstrates a sophisticated analysis of EMS issues by a court that ultimately denied immunity to EMS providers in a wrongful death case.1 Illinois law provides absolute immunity to a local public entity for failure to evaluate, diagnose and treat.2 Two very different sides of the story were […]
A recent decision from the Illinois Supreme Court demonstrates the willingness of the court to uphold immunity for EMS in a case involving an ambulance accident (Wilkins v. Williams, 2013 IL, 114310, 991 NE 2d 308, 372 Ill.Dec.1). On Nov. 14, 2005, Rhonda Williams was driving an ambulance transporting a non-emergency patient. Her partner, Vernette […]
Protecting EMS quality assurance activities from the prying eyes of plaintiffs’ attorneys isn’t a simple issue. Protection from legal discovery is paramount for any health-care environment to foster a culture of learning from errors. Fear of having information used against them in civil litigation chills the ability of EMS providers to engage in candid error […]
Result could affect dispatch communications & coding The miscoding of an emergency call in Skagit County, Wash., resulted in a lawsuit that may change the way in which courts look at immunity for 9-1-1 dispatch centers. After seven years of litigation, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in November 2012 that a wrongful death lawsuit filed […]
Is there an ethical obligation to disclose? The ethical obligation to disclose medical errors is well recognized in most areas of medicine. Concealing a medical error may violate ethical codes. The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), in its clinical and practice management guidelines, has indicated that emergency physicians should provide prompt and accurate information […]
What you should know about negligence Many of us have heard the highly sensationalized stories of patients being assessed by EMS as deceased, who ultimately turn out to still be alive. A North Carolina Court of Appeals case published in 2011 demonstrates how one court handled such a case when an accident victim brought a […]
W. Ann “Winnie” Maggiore, JD, NREMT-P, has been a full-time paramedic, an assistant fire chief, a state EMS administrator and a criminal prosecutor. She’s currently a shareholder with the law firm Butt, Thornton & Baehr in Albuquerque, N.M., where she defends medical malpractice suits against physicians and other health-care providers and civil rights suits against law enforcement officers. She also writes on EMS legal issues, frequently lectures at national conferences and holds a clinical faculty appointment with the University of New Mexico Department of Emergency Medicine.
More Articles from W. Ann "Winnie" Maggiore
Inside Current Issue
Implementing a Health Information Exchange
Documentation Differences
SARS-Like Virus a Global Threat
Recall Alert
