Health Care Complaints and Professional Legal Responsibility - A Cross-Country Comparative Review.

One approach to stimulating patient safety and health care quality is through holding health care professionals legally responsible for their performance. Law and health care variation across countries, however, makes it difficult to get an overview and make comparisons of the personal legal responsibility of health care providers. This article describes health care professional liability and complaint measures in some European countries (UK, The Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark) and US. Countries all have established a public authority to assess complaints about health professional performance and opportunities for economic compensation. The assessment of health professional legal responsibility generally relies on comparisons to supposedly "objective" standards predominantly dictated by the health profession. In line with the aim of ensuring acceptable care for all, health ethics principles on justice, respect for patients' autonomy, and the duty to do good and prevent harm may provide an attractive supplement in the description of legal responsibility in the health professions.