The Quality of Care Information Protection Act, 2016 (QCIPA) protects from disclosure the information created by or for a hospital’s designated quality-of-care committee when it reviews a critical incident or adverse event. The purpose is to encourage candid internal review so that systems can be improved, by assuring participants that their analysis will not be produced in litigation.
QCIPA creates a real tension in medical malpractice cases. The statute shields quality-of-care committee information, but it does not protect the underlying clinical facts and records, which remain producible. The boundary between protected quality-of-care material and discoverable factual information is a recurring source of dispute, as plaintiffs seek to understand what a hospital concluded about an incident and defendants invoke the statutory protection.
Posts tagged QCIPA analyze Ontario decisions and issues involving the scope of quality-of-care protection and its limits in medical malpractice litigation.
A practical guide to making a complaint about hospital care in Ontario, including the legislative framework, the disclosure rights you have, and how to get a substantive response.
An Ontario decision applying the Wigmore test to protect hospital quality of care review documents from production, even where the documents were relevant.
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