ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the essential aspects of formal and informal Japanese systems for assessing, compensating, and prosecuting medical practice-associated harm. Distinctive features of criminal law, civil law, and administrative compensation programs are explored.
Criminal law: Notorious errors at hospitals of high repute around the turn of the century focused public attention on slipshod practices and dishonesty in the medical world. The criminal justice system, amplified by media reportage, sounded a wake-up call to a medical profession previously lacking in accountability mechanisms. The health ministry and organized medicine implemented measures to improve patient safety; the effectiveness of those measures is unknown. Prosecutors’ actions policing medical quality provoked reactions from medical providers eliciting public sympathy, contributing to a string of acquittals of medical defendants and clipping the prosecutors’ wings.
Civil law: Civil Code provisions governing medical injury lawsuits are fault-based and similar to rules applied in North America and Western Europe …
Leflar, Robert B, Medical Injury Litigation and Compensation Systems in Japan (November 14, 2020), in Medical Liability in Asia and Australasia (V Raposo and R Beran eds, Singapore: Springer 2021).
First posted 2021-01-05 18:33:28
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