Hospital negligence claims address the institutional liability of hospitals for harm caused to patients, separate from the personal liability of individual physicians, nurses, or other professionals. In Ontario, hospitals can be liable directly for failures in systems, equipment, supervision, credentialing, staffing, or protocols, and they can be liable vicariously for the conduct of their employees, including nurses and resident physicians. Most attending physicians, by contrast, are independent contractors with hospital privileges rather than employees, which constrains vicarious liability for their conduct.
The distinction between hospital and physician liability matters at every stage of a case: the limitation analysis under section 5 of the Limitations Act, 2002 may run differently against the institution and the physician, the discovery obligations differ, the expert evidence required differs, and the available defendants in a settlement or judgment differ.
Posts tagged Hospital Negligence analyze Ontario cases in which the hospital’s own conduct, as distinct from any individual practitioner’s, has been at issue: nursing supervision, communication systems, transfer protocols, equipment failures, and the institutional response to deteriorating patients.
A psychiatrist was seriously assaulted by a patient. The BC Court of Appeal confirmed that hospitals owe a duty of care to medical staff, and that the standard is contextual.
A BC court certified a class action against a hospital that allegedly hired an imposter nurse. Some causes of action were certified; others were left to individual claims.
A medication error caused real distress but no compensable mental injury. The Court of Appeal applied the Saadati threshold and dismissed the claim.
An Ontario decision applying the Wigmore test to protect hospital quality of care review documents from production, even where the documents were relevant.
Most hospital falls are not negligent. Some are. A practical guide to when a fall in hospital becomes a legal claim, and what patients should do next.
On Inside Medical Malpractice with Chris Rokosh: medication errors as Never Events, the 10 rights of medication administration, and what they mean in litigation.
A settlement involving a 65-year-old man whose ankle fracture went 40 days without orthopedic follow-up, leading to joint infection and below-knee amputation.
Paul Cahill settled a wrongful death claim after hospital staff failed to connect oxygen tubing to a patient’s CPAP machine, leading to cardiac arrest.
Paul Cahill settled a medical malpractice claim involving permanent vestibular damage from unmonitored outpatient gentamicin therapy.
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