It is widely believed among the medical and legal professions that a system for reporting and discussing medical errors is crucial to improving the safety of all patients served by the healthcare system. However, among the many factors blocking open reporting, the most damaging is the uniform fear of legal consequences. The NPSF Joint Medical-Legal Conference at SMU (hereafter referred to as the Conference) begins an unprecedented dialogue and joint effort between the legal and medical professions to generically identify and move toward those commonly-held goals both professions constantly cite: The protection of the health and the rights of patients from unnecessary injury or death in the course of medical practice. The Conference will achieve this by bringing together an equal number of highly qualified and knowledgeable experts from the medical and legal professions to: Increase interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding. Engage in dialogue that will serve as a foundation for the development of model statues, procedures, and regulatory standards that encourage and enable aggressive communication among healthcare professionals of critical information about adverse medical outcomes, while preserving the essential rights and abilities of legitimate plaintiffs to recover from truly tortious, injurious conduct. Identify and prioritize short-and long-term actions that need to be taken to include writing, publishing, and disseminating a Conference summary document. The crucial importance of this Conference is based on the past decade of growing knowledge and alarm that the public is suffering from a preventable epidemic of medical mistakes and accidents which kill, injure, or threaten an unacceptably large percentage of patients each year. There is a growing understanding that a majority of injurious medical mistakes result, at least in part, from the generic failure of healthcare professionals to openly exchange vital information. The proposed conference dates are March 6, 7, 8, 2003.
