Science / Medicine : Malpractice Suits Reported Rare

Fewer than 2% of people who are harmed by incompetent medical care file malpractice suits, suggesting that the legal system rarely holds bad doctors accountable for their mistakes, according to a Harvard study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. While hardly any patients who have truly suffered from poor care get compensated, the study found, most of the lawsuits that do get filed are based on questionable claims.

“The paper raises some serious questions about the ability of the current system to identify cases in which there is injury caused by substandard care,” said A. Russell Localio of Harvard Medical School, who directed the study. It was based on a review of 31,429 randomly selected hospital records from New York state in 1984.

The researchers concluded that 280 of these patients suffered “adverse events caused by medical negligence.” But only eight of those brought malpractice suits. Forty-three other lawsuits were filed, but none of them clearly fit the researchers’ criteria for serious harm and poor care.

The researchers said people who have been harmed by the medical system might not bring suit because they fail to realize that they have received poor care, find attorneys “repugnant,” don’t want to spoil longstanding relationships with their doctors or figure they are unlikely to win.