Quality Review: Court Says Documents Are Exempt From Discovery In Patient’s Lawsuit.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
October 2017
The compliance officer, a registered nurse, was a member of the group home’s corporate parent’s performance improvement committee. After the incident the committee asked her to investigate to determine if adequate safeguards existed for patient safety or whether additional safeguards were necessary to improve patient safety. SUPREME COURT OF ALABAMA September 8, 2017
A resident of a group home for developmentally disabled persons was assaulted, beaten and stabbed by another resident. The victim’s father filed a civil lawsuit against the group home on his son’s behalf. The lawsuit alleged that negligent supervision of the perpetrator by the group home’s staff was the cause of his son’s injuries.
For the lawsuit to succeed, the father’s lawyers needed to find proof that caregivers at the group home knew ahead of time from his prior aggressive acts that the perpetrator had violent tendencies toward other individuals in a similar residential setting. The father’s lawyers believed the proof they needed to succeed with their client’s case could be found in the notes and conclusions prepared by the facility’s corporate compliance officer who investigated the incident for the quality review committee. The father’s lawyers formally demanded copies of all such documents in the group home’s possession, citing the general provisions of the civil court discovery rules.
The group home declined to provide copies, citing the law which shields quality review documents as protected by the peer review and quality assurance privilege.
The Supreme Court of Alabama ruled the documents in question were shielded by the quality review privilege and were not subject to civil discovery by the other side in litigation against the group home.
The registered nurse who served as compliance officer in the group home’s owner’s corporate office gave a sworn affidavit. In her affidavit she stated that after the incident the performance improvement committee, of which she is a member, asked her to identify the factors that led to the incident and to determine whether adequate safeguards were in place to ensure patient safety or whether additional safeguards needed to be implemented to prevent such incidents in the future.
The telling points were that the nurse/compliance officer was specifically directed by the performance improvement committee to prepare the documents in question for use by the committee and that the investigation was conducted for the purpose of improving the quality of patient care. The nurse’s report was not an incident re-port prepared in the ordinary course of business.
Ex Parte, __ So. 3d __, 2017 WL 3940949 (Ala., September 8, 2017).More references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-assurance-privilege.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-assurance-confidentiality.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-assurance-peer-review.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-review-privilege.htm