Articles
Legal Issues in Patient Safety: The Example of Nosocomial Infection
Recent years have witnessed a growing number of lawsuits aimed at seeking redress for lapses in patient safety. In early 2004, an Ontario law firm filed a class action lawsuit ...
Trillium Health Centre's Journey to Disclosure
Disclosure has been defined in the Canadian Safety Patient Dictionary as "the imparting, by healthcare workers to patients or their significant others, of information pertaining to any healthcare event affecting ...
Pursuing Criminal Charges Against Patients who are Reported as Having Assaulted Healthcare Professionals: Considerations
This paper responds to questions regarding the procedures of criminally charging patients with assault, with considerations learned from the Toronto Police Services, an RN, a Nurse Manager, a Psychiatrist, a ...
High-Cost Users of Ontario's Healthcare Services
Approximately 1.5% of Ontario's population, represented by the top 5% highest cost-incurring users of Ontario's hospital and home care services, account for 61% of hospital and home care costs.
Letter from the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care
Ontario's healthcare system is faced with unprecedented challenges. We are slowly pulling out of the worst economic downturn since the advent of medicare, and, for the foreseeable future, economic growth ...
Accountability through Regulation in Ontario’s Medical Laboratory Sector
This case study, using both documents and interview data, examines the approaches to accountability in the Ontario Medical Laboratory Sector, noting both the challenges and benefits. The greatest challenges exist ...
Bio-Crime: The Criminalization of HIV in Canada
The paper considers criticism of HIV criminalization from the perspectives of public health and human rights. Taking these criticisms into account, the paper concludes with two policy options for HIV ...
Healthcare and the Law: A View from the Bar
When a patient's care becomes the subject of medical-legal litigation, those from healthcare involved in the case may not understand the decisions of the lawyers and the final judgment of ...
Thinking about Thinking: Implications for Patient Safety
How do physicians know what they know? Rather than thinking like scientists - or how we think scientists think - physicians are engaged in analogical, interpretive reasoning that resembles Aristotle's ...
Shared Decision-Making
Shared decision-making has been called the crux of patient-centred care and identified as a key part of change for improved quality and safety in healthcare. However, it rarely happens, is ...