Quality of health care and the role of relationships: bridging the medico-legal divide.

Abstract

This Article focuses on an often overlooked barrier to efforts to enhance the quality of health care: the relationship crisis that currently exists between physicians and patients. This state of affairs has resulted from the divide between the medical and legal worlds. The medical arena has understandably tended to view the doctor-patient relationship as a purely medical issue, ignoring the law's impact in generating and sustaining problematic relationship patterns. The legal world has yet to fully recognize this state of affairs, and the law's role in its evolution and persistence. We offer a relational approach to health-care law as a means of bridging the divide between the two disciplines. In the malpractice context, this would entail adopting a no-fault compensation scheme, which is committed to strengthening collaborative doctor-patient relations, enhancing patient safety and systemic learning, while providing adequate compensation.