Vicarious Liability – Make sure you understand this concept. Suppose you have a family practice and take care of pregnant women on a regular basis. In fact you have good relationships with and a good network of midwives who you refer to and they refer patients to you.   

Let’s suppose you referred a patient to one of these midwives, you continued to care for the woman throughout her pregnancy and everything was going along fine until the delivery where something went wrong.  You hear about this from the midwife and your patient does not return and she does not return calls to her to express your concern.

Then you get that awful letter from her attorney informing you that she is suing you related to the delivery. Indignant you proclaim “how can she sue me, I wasn’t there”

Well she can sue you due to the concept of vicarious liability. And chances are that those midwives you are referring to don’t have malpractice insurance. So if a delivery does go wrong you may get dragged into a malpractice suit for having referred the patient to that midwife. This would be especially true if the midwife was sharing space with you or renting space from you. Same is true for other chiropractors who share space with you or vice versa.

So what do you do?

First, find out if the midwives you are referring to carry malpractice insurance. Especially if they are using your office in any way, shape or form. Next, don’t refer to just one midwife. Have a panel of them that your patients can choose from and don’t recommend one over the other.

Finally, make sure your malpractice policy covers you for vicarious liability exposure. If it does not and you get sued – guess who has to pay for it?

Never is it more true than with malpractice insurance that to a large extent, “you get what you pay for”.  At ChiroFutures, our primary objective is to provide quality coverage, backed by a financially strong carrier at a competitive cost.  We do not want to leave gaps in coverage or offer insufficient limits.

As always I look forward to your feedback, comments and suggestions.

Matthew McCoy DC, MPH
CEO & Co-Founder
ChiroFutures
drmccoy@chirofutures.org
http://www.chirofutures.org