Medical error and medical incident: common and different

Introduction. The development of modern medicine is characterized by technological progress with the increasing complexity of instruments, procedures, and manipulations. With the growth of the introduction of complex diagnostic and therapeutic technologies, the number of potential complications, failures, and errors increases accordingly. High-quality medical care is care without gross medical malpractice. The tension around medical malpractice has stimulated the legal system to formalise and expand the application of such concepts as «medical incident» and «insurance event». The given concepts are ambiguous, the nature of their relationship with the concepts of «medical malpractice» and «iatrogenesis» is not clearly defined, which complicates the understanding and control of the «medical malpractice” issue. The purpose of the study is to determine the common features and differences between the concepts of “medical malpractice” and “medical incident”. Materials and methods. The Study Materials include current laws in the field of healthcare, articles reflecting the problem of medical incidents and medical malpractice over the past five years. Research methods are axiomatic and general-logical (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, analogy, etc.). Results. A medical incident is a polysemantic concept, meaning both an event that caused harm to the patient’s health and one that passed without such harm. A medical incident is a broad concept that includes the notions of “iatrogenesis”, “medical malpractice” and “insurance event”. Attempts to replace the concept of «medical malpractice» with a medical incident lead not only to confusion, but mainly to the substitution of the essence of the phenomenon. Such a substitution complicates an important process in medicine – analysis and learning from mistakes. Conclusion. It is necessary to distinguish the guilt of a medical malpractice in the legal field from guilt in the moral field. The features in common and distinctions between the concepts of a medical malpractice «innocent in the legal field» and «guilty in the legal field» are presented. Insufficient understanding and uncertainty of positions in the problem of medical malpractice determine the extremes in approaches to its solution. The theory of medical malpractice, one aspect of which is the ordering of the concepts under discussion, is a separate subdiscipline. Without a special study of this science, it is difficult to expect an understanding of the issue of malpractice and its satisfactory control.

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