Prague, Nov 19 (CTK) – Number of legal complaints filed by patients against doctors, respectively hospitals, over their mistakes in the treatment has doubled in the Czech Republic in the past 15 years, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes yesterday.
The reason is that the quality of health care has worsened, defence lawyer Marie Cilinkova, who represents patients in healthcare disputes, told MfD.
“Hospitals lack hundreds of qualified doctors and nurses. Their work must be done by doctors without the necessary experience. This often leads to a patient’s death or health damage,” she said.
Surgeon Milos Voleman, member of the Czech Doctors’ Chamber (CLK) leadership, admits that the quality of care has been worsening because of the lack of doctors and nurses.
“However, hospitals do not have money either for higher salaries of their present doctors and nurses or for hiring new ones. Consequently, the staff are overburdened, they serve too many overtime hours,” Voleman told MfD.
Cilinkova says around 20 patients turn to her with substantiated complaints against health care a month.
Defence lawyer Jan Mach, who has long represented hospitals in such disputes, has confirmed that the number of lawsuits against doctors has been rising.
The cases of damaging patients’ health due to insufficient or unprofessional care most often occur during weekends or in the night when young doctors who do not have a post-graduate certification yet are on duty without the supervision of an experienced colleague, Mach added.
He points out that hospitals thereby violate law and bear full responsibility for the health damage.
Commercial insurance companies have also registered a rising number of legal complaints against doctors. Every hospital must take out an insurance policy to cover their personnel’s possible mistakes, MfD says.
Under the new Civil Code, insurance companies can pay higher damages to patients than in the past, and this is why insurance policies for hospitals are also more expensive, the paper writes.
The General Teaching Hospitals in Prague spends 14 million crowns on insurance a year, which is almost twice more than two years ago, its spokesman Filip Broz said.
Yet insurance companies say the sum is still too low since the financial compensation for a serious health damage might amount to dozens of mullions of crowns, MfD says.
($1=25.436 crowns)
hol/t
