Mediating Health Care Disputes

Course overview

All primary and specialty health professionals face formidable legal challenges to successful lifelong practice, including malpractice exposure, contracting for employment, forming partnerships or limited liability businesses, and maintaining optimal patient/client-provider professional relations, among other practice parameters. This course introduces a little-known or utilized alternatives to taking any and all disputes to court, namely, mediation, one of two forms of alternative dispute resolution. Mediation involves utilizing (often free-of-charge) a trained attorney or non-attorney specialist mediator to assist parties with civil or criminal disputes (including health care malpractice cases, and disputes within health professional academic and employment settings, among others) to amicably and civilly resolve their issues without resort to initiating or continuing in the formal litigation system. Mediation and its related process, binding arbitration, are less formal than litigation, less costly, resolved in less time, in most cases, without a written record. The course concludes with a discussion on how health professionals themselves may become mediators for their specialty areas of expertise, again, often at no- or low-cost, through attending county or parish dispute resolution center-sponsored basic mediator courses, offered regularly throughout the year. This course is targeted toward intermediate to advanced-level professionals and professional students in all disciplines, including, but not limited to, physical, occupational and speech therapy, nursing, athletic training, medicine, and chiropractic.