Review And Suggestions On Laws On The Handling Of Medical Accidents

In recent years, with the reform of Medicare System, the enhancement of citizens'law awareness, and especially the heightening of right defending, more and more contradictions have emerged between citizens'expectation of health of their own as well as their family members and the reality of clinical medicine, the result of which are the great number of disputes over medical accidents in both medical institutions and society. Trouble brought by medical accidents prevails all over the world. With continuous developments of human medicine, the number of medical accidents caused by various reasons has a tendency to increase. As people are enjoying health protection provided by medical institutions, they also have to face the threats brought by medical accident, the invisible killer. Issues concerning medical accidents are not only hot topics among the public but also hard nut matters for our law system. The correct handling of medical accidents concerns the living right and health right of citizens as well as the survival and development of medical institutions and progress of clinical medicine. Meanwhile, it also concerns the orders and stability of the society and it will always exist as long as people'struggle with diseases continues. Therefore, it is not only a very serious legal problem but also a scientific and political task to handle medical accidents correctly. This paper gives a review of the history of handling of medical accidents in our country and it makes several suggestions on how to handle medical accidents in a better way. This paper gives elaborations in the following four chapters. First, it reviews the ways of handling medical accidents in ancient times, mainly in the Western Zhou Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, to discuss how they handle medical accidents in ancient times. Then, it makes a brief introduction of the handling of medical accidents and characteristics of those medical accidents during the period from the founding of our country to the early reform and opening up. After that, taking the contents of The Regulation on the Handling of Medical Accidents as an example, it discusses the problems emerging after the Regulation was issued as well as defects of that Regulation. Next, it elaborates on methods and features of the handling of medical accidents after the issue of the Regulation and also analyses the problems of that time. Compared with The Measures on the Handling of Medical Accidents, The Regulation on the Handling of Medical Accidents is obviously more like a civil law. The Regulation also filled in the gaps in the legislation on the handling of medical accidents and made it more clear and concrete to handle medical accidents in a standard way. Further more, following the same principles of the basic law, the Regulation made improvements on legislation on the handling of medical accidents. However, there are still defects in the Regulation; and, as an administrative regulation that is less powerful than Civil Procedure Law and General Principles of the Civil Law, the Regulation can't be applied as special law does; and the contradiction between the Regulation and the former ones as well as the Criminal Law still exist. In order to make it more suitable for the construction of socialistic law system, the author, using foreign relevant legal experience for reference, gives some suggestions on handling medical accidents from three aspects, including the improvement of legislation on handling of medical accidents, of management of hospitals and of enhancing the qualities of medical staff.