Towards Establishing a Specialized Medical Disputes Court
Participants in the two-day international conference on the civil liability of private health institutions and healthcare professionals, organized by the Supreme Court, proposed several recommendations aimed at improving legal and professional practices in the health sector.
Key recommendations include:
- Specialized Court for Medical Disputes: Establishing a dedicated court to handle medical disputes, similar to specialized commercial courts.
- Support for Southern Health Institutions: Enabling private health institutions in southern Algeria, which provide public services, to benefit from civil service provisions for specialist doctors.
- Training in Medical Expertise: Creating a medical specialization focused on forensic and medical expertise, requiring additional training after completing forensic medicine studies.
- Continuous Professional Training: Providing ongoing training for registered medical experts involved in judicial processes.
- Promoting Alternative Dispute Resolution: Encouraging mediation and amicable medical expertise to resolve disputes efficiently.
Legal and Procedural Improvements:
Assign judicial medical expertise exclusively to specialists in the relevant field.
Establish nullity for medical expertise reports lacking procedural fairness as per Article 3 of the Civil and Administrative Procedure Code.
Amend procedural laws to accommodate the unique nature of medical disputes, akin to labor, social security, and commercial disputes.
Require preliminary stages to assess cases before initiating judicial proceedings against healthcare professionals.
Incorporate the concept of medical accidents into legislative frameworks and introduce an automatic compensation system for damages caused by medical incidents, aligning with existing compensation systems for work and traffic accidents.
Additional Recommendations:
Enhance patient awareness through adequate and informed consent documentation.
Organize regular scientific meetings between judicial and medical professionals.
Integrate medical law into the curricula for both legal and medical education, emphasizing specialized judge training in medical disputes.
Establish a government committee to develop a bilingual glossary of medical-legal terminology.
Create an annual award for outstanding academic work in the intersection of law and medicine.
Facilitate public sector doctors’ contributions to private health institutions.
Strengthen the role of translation institutes in providing legal and medical translation training for professionals.
The conference also emphasized the importance of adhering to judicial precedents set by the Supreme Court, clarifying the concept of professional civil liability, and aligning legal reforms with evolving judicial practices. These steps aim to ensure fairness, transparency, and efficiency in addressing medical disputes while fostering collaboration between the healthcare and legal sectors.
