Hospital’s Organizational Duty: Civil and Criminal Liability

Abstract

As more and more medical service is provided by hospital, a new basis of medical liability, hospital’s organizational duty, has arisen. Hospital typically differentiates various parts of medical service and allocates them to different departments. The division of labor enhances the efficiency and professionality of the service and enables a service which could not have been provided otherwise. It poses, however, new risk that nobody in the organization has a comprehensive understanding of and control over the process. Patients might be unattended by anybody at some point of the process. This risk should be coped with or compensated by the new duty to organize the structure and cooperation in the hospital adequately. In many jurisdictions including Germany, France, the United States and South Korea, this new duty has been acknowledged by legislation and more importantly by jurisprudence. All those show similar landscapes: Hospital’s organizational duty has a function to enlarge hospital’s (civil) liability and/or concentrate medical (civil) liability to the hospital so as to provide the victim, the patient, a better way to be compensated and to preserve the rapport between the attending physician and the patient. It also has a function to lessen the burden of proof from the patient’s side, especially in the context of hospital contagion. It poses a new problem of the influence of the existence and weight of hospital’s own liability for the defective organization upon the individual physician’s medical liability. Last, but not least, there is the problem of the implication of the existence of organizational duty upon the medical criminal liability. This issue has not been addressed thus far perhaps because there are few cases in criminal justice practice. It’s theoretical importance can hardly be exaggerated, though, as it shows dramatically the structural transposition of modern medical service provision and its possible influence on the overall regime of modern medical liability. South Korea has already a few cases that show this issue can arise anytime in practice.