Is Medical Malpractice Academic?
TUESDAY, Oct. 7 (HealthDayNews) — Where your doctor attended medical school predicts the odds that he or she will be sued for malpractice. The connection between the diploma and the deposition isn’t immediately evident, the researchers say. But an obvious implication of the work is that quality of early medical training bears on quality of care in practice. “There is a link here,” says study leader Teresa Waters, a health economist at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. “Do we understand it? No, but we find one.” Waters and her colleagues, whose study appears in a recent issue of Quality and Safety in Health Care, analyzed malpractice claims against 30,000-odd doctors practicing in Florida, Maryland and Louisiana between 1990 and 1997. Roughly 11 percent of the doctors were involved in a malpractice lawsuit during that time. They also had access to where the doctors had gone to medical school and when they graduated. Only doctors trained in the United States were included in the s
