Bioethics and Medical Litigation in France: An Exploratory Study
Rania Nader, Henri‐Corto Stoeklé, Louisa Smail Shehba, Pascal Jazat, Christian HervéABSTRACT
Aims and Objectives
Medical litigation is a matter of particular concern for hospitals. We decided to examine whether bioethics might offer additional insights into these disputes.
Method
We conducted a highly exploratory and descriptive study in empirical bioethics, relying exclusively on a sample of scientific articles addressing medical litigation in France and primarily derived from real‐world healthcare settings. Analysis proceeded manually in three stages: (i) a content analysis of the sample; (ii) a thematic analysis of the collected information; and (iii) a bio‐ethical analysis of the identified themes and codes, and collected information.
Results
We ultimately derived three broader themes, presented in descending order of importance: “Legal Claims”, “Poor Practices”, and “Specific Laws”. Informed by these themes, but also associated codes and collected information, we may already infer several ethical tensions between responsibility―but understood here as a fundamental moral value rather than a simple legal obligation to account for one's professional actions―and a wide range of health and life science practices, most of which relate to surgical interventions to dis day. However, it remains difficult to determine whether these tensions reflect a single macro‐bio‐ethical issue―that is, an ethical tension or dilemma between health and/or life science practices and moral values and/or standards at a societal or country level―or rather a set of distinct micro‐bio‐ethical issues―arising at the level of given individuals or institutions.
Conclusion
Bioethics warrants closer engagement with such disputes, insofar as they might embody bio‐ethical issues of sufficient significance.