Presentation to examine prospects of tort reform
Thursday November 1, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Joan Gilmour is looking to use an upcoming health law conference to share recommendations with her colleagues on how to improve the existing litigation for the benefit of patient safety.

An associate professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, Gilmour is one of two people giving a presentation on emerging liability issues at the upcoming Visions National Health Law Conference (Nov. 8 to 10) in Banff, Alberta.

She is presenting recommendations from her Health Canada report entitled, Patient Safety, Medical Error and Tort Law: An International Comparison. Her co-presenter is Gerald Robertson with the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta.

Gilmour says she’s been asked to speak on the future of tort law reform because of her work on the Health Canada report, which examines the short and long-term prospects of tort reform.

Although Gilmour isn’t the first to recommend changes to the tort system, she is hoping her recommendations will result in more follow-through than those who went before her.

“It really is a response to the increasing recognition that is given to the extent of medical error in the system and the efforts that are being made on the part of patient safety advocates to make changes within the system,” Gilmour says.

“My report is really looking at how a tort system can fit with that." She says there are improvements that could be made with the way things are currently being done.

Gilmour says she wants to use her presentation time Nov. 9 as an opportunity to engage the audience in a discussion about whether or not Canada should move to a no-tort or a no-fault system, or to think about changes to the current system that can improve patient care and reduce medical error.

“I hope they will take away some of the concrete suggestions I make and see how they could be implemented,” Gilmour says.

When asked what insurance reciprocals such as HIROC could do to help further tort reform, Gilmour responded by saying the system needs to make better use of the litigation information already available and feed that into patient safety efforts.

“Within our current litigation system, there is a lot of information that surfaces in lawsuits and that is available to insurers,” she says. “One of the recommendations I would make is that there be a more systemic use made of that information in terms of disseminating it to others, both to healthcare institutions and to healthcare providers or professionals, to see what lessons could be learned.”

Gilmour is also recommending access to that information be granted sooner rather than later.

“I don’t know the extend to which a lot of the information is made available before files are actually closed, and I assume there are concerns about making too much information available before something is concluded, but that often takes a long time and it’s more useful to have the information available sooner rather than later,” she says.

“One of the other things I recommend is that there also has to be capacity built into the system to actually take advantage of and incorporate the information and the lessons learned that come out from that information about claims made.”

For more information on Gilmour’s report, click here.

For more information on the Visions conference, read this story or visit this website.