Chapter 7: Legal and Ethical Aspects of Sonography Flashcards
True or False: Sonographers are responsible for any harm that a patient may suffer as a result of their actions, even when working under the direction of a physician.
True
We live in an era that emphasized the legal rights of who?
Patients and Healthcare Professionals
What is Accountability?
The responsibility for events for which you may have to give a judicial explanation.
What are laws?
The rules of conduct enforced by a controlling authority.
What are medical laws?
Laws that deal with a particular sphere of human activity, namely the patient care.
What is the goal of medical law?
To protect people, to correct inustice, and to compensate for injury.
What are civil laws?
laws that affect the individual and not society as a whole.
What are the different types of laws?
Statutory
Administrative
Common Law
Torts
What is a Statutory law?
Laws enacted and enforced by federal or state legislators to help maintain the governmental rights to uphold social order and to protect the rights of individuals.
What is a Administrative law?
Laws made by administrative agencies appointed by the president or governor.
What is Common law?
A court-made law based on custom and usage.
What is a tort?
A wrongful act, other than a breach of contract, for which the law provides a remedy.
What are the two types of torts?
Intentional tort and Unintentional tort
What is an intentional tort?
Assault, battery, invasion of privacy, and false imprisonment.
This is deliberately doing a wrongful act.
What is an unintentional tort?
Negligence
What is assault?
A threat to inflict physical injury on another person through force or violence
What is battery?
the touching of another person, directly or with an object, in a harmful or offensive manner.
What is invasion of privacy?
Intrusion on a person’s right to be left alone.
What is confidentiality?
Keeping a patient’s medical records private unless a release of information is provided by the patient.
What is a Policy and Procedure Manual?
Consistent guide to be followed under a given set of circumstances. A procedure is a sequence of steps for completing a given activity. May be available on paper or electronically.
What is Autonomy?
The right to make our own decisions
What is documentation?
An accurate and complete record of a patient’s care of an employee behavior.
What is Negiligence?
An act or omission, failure to act, by a medical professional that deviates from the accepted medical standard of care, resulting in injury or death of the patient.
What is Standard of Care?
Medical treatment guidelines.
What is Medical Malpractice?
When a negligent act or omission by a medical professional results in harm to the patient.
In a medical malpractice action, an injured patient must prove what four things?
duty, breach, harm, and causation.
What is duty?
Refers to the standard of care that the medical professional is required to follow.
What is breach?
The defendant’s failure to meet that standard of care
What is harm?
refers to the injury sustained by the plaintiff
What is causation?
Requires that the defendant’s failure to meet the standard of care was the actual cause of the plaintiff’s injury.
What is res ipsa loquitur?
The thing speaks for itself
What is informed consent?
A process by which a patient grants permission to have a procedure after hearing the benefits, risks, and alternative choices available to him or her.
What are the two types of informed conset?
Express or Implied
What is express consent?
given by the patient either in writing or verbally.
What is implied consent?
neither written nor spoken by the patient, it is understood from the circumstances surrounding the procedure.
What is liabiility?
A legal responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions.
What three doctrines of liability is negligence based on?
Master-Servant
Ostensible Agency
Res Ispa Loquitur (The Thing Speaks for Itself)
Under what theory can the sonographer’s employer be held liable for the sonographer’s negligence as long as the sonographer was acting within the scope of employment?
Respondeat superior (Let the master answer)
