Are paramedic required to recognize stroke and deliver the stroke victim to ER? ER arrives for a somewhat confused patient. Her speech is slurred, she has no balance. Her husband has very limited English and calls his son to translate via Skype. The paramedics warn about the danger of contracting covid-19 in ER and asks the patient whether she wants them to drive her to ER. The patient doesn't quite understand what's going on and says &quot;no&quot;. The son asks the paramedics via Skype to evaluate her and make the decision. The paramedics reply that they don't see anything wrong with her. The daughter-in-law, an RN, tells them via Skype that the patient may have a stroke and they should take her to ER. They reply that they have to go with what the person present tells them. They leave. The patient indeed had stroke and, due to 24-hour delay, her condition worsened significantly and irreversible. Is the paramedic company liable?
Maybe, but probably not, although this would be a question of fact to resolve on a case by case basis under broad legal standards by a jury, and would also depend upon the state where it took place, and upon the nature of the employer of the paramedic. The hypothetical facts in this case are rich enough and ambiguous enough that the case could go either way depending upon how it was presented and what could be proven at trial. This is a case it would be good to take to a medical malpractice/personal injury lawyer in the jurisdiction where it happened to be evaluated. Usually a PI lawyer would not charge you for doing so or would ask for only a nominal fee. Additional factual investigation would probably also be necessary regarding some of the key facts identified below. It's complicated and there are multiple issues presented in this case where the law is not uniform from state to state. The general rule is that a medical professional has to carry out the delivery of medical care to a patient with the reasonable care that would be taken by a medical professional of that type. If the medical professional fails to take reasonable care, and that negligence failure to do so causes injury, then there is civil liability for medical malpractice. A threshold issue would be whether a medical professional-patient relationship was established. This would be a question of fact for a jury and would be a question upon which various potentially applicable state and federal laws would often not be uniform. On these facts, it could easily go either way. In federal court and in a majority of state courts (although there is variation from state to state) you need to know the name of the paramedic you dealt with who provided the bad advice to bring a successful lawsuit before suing. In a minority of states, you could sue first and get the name of the paramedic in discovery through the court process from the hospital after the lawsuit was commenced. The standard of reasonable care liability in this case would be judged by the standard of a reasonable paramedic, not a reasonable doctor. But, often states would have statutes that would limit the liability of paramedics in these situations to liability for gross negligence (which the facts in the question would probably not suffice to show), but not for ordinary negligence (which a jury could come out either way upon and which would hinge heavily on expert testimony). These tort reform type laws differ considerably from state to state. Whether or not particular conduct was negligent or grossly negligent, is a question ultimately decided by a jury under very broad and general legal standards after the fact in a trial, based largely upon expert testimony, on a case by case basis, unless the facts are unequivocally clear one way or the other, which is rarely the case. With my layman's level of knowledge about what a reasonable paramedic should be able to diagnose, I could see this determination going either way. Two cases with identical facts in front of the same judge in separate trials, in which juries are presented with exactly the same evidence could come out differently. The resolution of one case of the question of whether a particular act constituted negligence giving rise to liability is not binding as precedent and is not admissible as evidence in another case (subject to a narrow exception called &quot;collateral estoppel&quot; which applies when the same individual is sued by multiple people for the same conduct in different lawsuits that have resulted in final orders resolving key questions of fact that the lawsuits have in common). Many states would require that someone suing the paramedic have a medical professional certify that the paramedic's actions constituted legal negligence before the suit could go forward in a court. If there is a medical professional-patient relationship, and if the medical professional was found to have negligently caused injury, the medical professional's employer would have vicarious liability in some (but not all) states under a respondiat superior doctrine. Usually, the paramedic at an ER would be an employee of a private EMS ambulance company or a municipal fire department, and not of the hospital that runs the ER. But, some hospitals have their own in house paramedics. Also, some hospitals are run by for profit or nonprofit private companies, some are state or local governmental agencies, and some a federal government agencies. Usually only a small minority of the medical professionals in a hospital are employed by that hospital, and most of them merely have &quot;privileges&quot; to provide medical services for which they bill patients separately while working for their own professional corporation through which they are self-employed. Legally, the hospital itself is more like a hotel or a WeWork office space than to being a firm that directly provides medical services, although it isn't quite that black and white. Holding the ER directly responsible for failing to have good triage policies, as opposed to holding the paramedic responsible and assigning vicarious liability to the employer of the paramedic, would be very difficult, although not necessarily impossible if the ER had official policies that fell far below the standard of care for emergency room triage. It would be very uncommon for an ER to have bad policies of this type. Typically, ERs are only held directly liable for bad triage policies when, for example, they have a policy of not evaluating at all someone who does not have health insurance, which is a practice expressly prohibited by federal law. If the paramedic's employer was a government entity such as a fire department or a government owned hospital, the paramedic would be entitled to absolute immunity from civil liability under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, unless an exception applied. Usually there is an express exception to absolute immunity for medical malpractice liability by a medical doctor who has established a doctor-patient relationship with a patient, when the medical doctor is employed by a state or local government, usually there isn't when the doctor is employed by the federal government. But these laws differ from state to state in fine details that matter in a case like this one regarding whether the exception to immunity from liability is limited to medical doctors or applies also to paramedics. Causation would also be an important factual issue for trial. There is liability only to the extent that taking a non-negligent action could have prevented the harm. If you are infected with COVID, one common consequence is a stroke, and if someone had a stroke while infected with COVID, the case that taking them to the ER would have prevented the stroke from doing serious damage in the long run is weaker. On the other hand, guessing that a stroke was really something else, might or might not be reasonable. The injured person would also have to prove that the EMS response occurred at a time within the roughly 1-2 hours after the start of a stroke when it is possible to take medical action that could do something about a stroke. If the stroke had already happened an hour and a half later and it was rush hour and would have taken half an hour to get to the nearest hospital, causation might be absent and there would be no liability. There would be a legitimate question of fact over whether there was an actual diagnosis and treatment, or whether there was a refusal to get treatment. The reasonable care test is a balancing test. It takes into consideration not just the potential benefits of taking action, but also the cost that would be incurred if action was taken, and the downside risks of a proposed action. The paramedic's concerns about getting a COVID infection at the ER when the person responded to didn't appear to have it at the time would make the cost of a false positive diagnosis higher and would thus influence what would constitute reasonable care in this situation as the jury applies the relevant legal test. Liability would be evaluated based upon what the paramedic reasonable understood he was being told. This would be a question of fact for the jury. It is likely that different people who were present understood what was being said differently. Even if bystanders understood what was being said and meant, what matters is what the paramedic reasonably understood was being said and meant. Given the communication difficulties involved, that question could go either way.
Firstly: that depends on the jurisdiction. It might not even be possible at all for employers to attempt to sue their own employees for damages caused by negligence. Even terminating an employment contract for reasons of negligence is quite difficult in many jurisdictions. Second, if it is possible, the question is wether such legal proceedings could be expected to be successful. Employees making mistakes is part of the risk of doing business, and distinguishing a "mistake" from "negligence", "gross negligence" , or "intentional wrongdoing" by the employee ought to place quite a burden of proof on the employer. To be held negligent in the first place, the employer will have to to prove that the employee was aware of the fact that the password they used was common, well-known and extremely insecure. Knowledge of which passwords are common and well-known is, unless you are considered a skilled IT security professional, not something that a typical employee can reasonably be expected to know. Before there can be a case for negligence by the employee, the employer needs to make a strong case that: either the employee is that skilled IT security professional that really should have know better or the company can demonstrate that they provide all employees with adequate instruction and security training that includes how to select good passwords and which bad ones to avoid and that they seriously ensure both awareness of their password and security policies and compliance. even then, not enforcing a good password policy in your IT systems and assigning or allowing users to select weak passwords is in itself already negligent...
Since you asked two questions: No and No Does a company’s T&amp;C or their house rules supersede law No and is asking private health status (including the request to wear a mask) an offence? No A company cannot require you to do things that are against the law but they can require you to do things that go further than the legal minimum. The UK and Spanish governments do not require you to wear a mask but they do not prohibit private organisations (like airlines) for making it a requirement to access their facilities. The law requires that they make reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities. But you don’t have a disability, you just can’t sleep with a mask on. If you had a disability you would have no trouble in getting a letter from your doctor to that effect. The contract requires them to take you from the UK to Spain: they don’t have to enable you to sleep. If you read the T&amp;C, you will find that they can refuse to carry you if, in their reasonable opinion, you pose a hazard to the aircraft or the people aboard it.
She can ask, but she does not have a right to be excused New York law for jurors does not have an automatic right to be excused because of familial care needs. There is a right to be excused for medical or financial hardship - which you might be able to argue here if, for example, you were at risk of losing your job. There is also a right for automatic postponement of 2 to 6 months (to allow you to arrange care, for example) but you have to request this a week in advance. Unfortunately, as they say on their website: "Jury duty, like paying taxes, is mandatory." That said, judges have discretion to excuse jurors and normal practice is for the judge to state the estimated length of the trial and ask for reasons why a juror cannot serve. If they satisfy the judge the juror will be excused.
You can write anything you want (basic First Amendment protections): the question is whether one would be liable for damage that arises from what you're written, or whether you can distribute what you've written. Distribution may be restricted, thanks to the Commerce Clause (hence FDA regulations, which figure prominently in the analysis). Most software writers are not medical practitioners, and vice versa, and what the software writer does is implement something described by a competent medical practitioner. It is logically possible that a med. practitioner might also try to write software (no problem) and distribute it (possibly a problem); or, a software writer might read up on something on Wikipedia and try to implement it (again, no problem) or distribute it (possible problem). Damages can be sorted into two categories, implementation errors and scientific errors, and having ruled out deliberate sabotage, we are left with negligence. If the software writer failed to use suitable care in writing code that sums a set of numbers, the software writer has been negligent. If the person purporting to have the qualified scientific knowledge mis-states the formula, that person has been negligent. It is possible for many parties to be negligent (the programmer failed to be diligent in understanding the software requirements; the medical professional failed to adequately explain what was required of the program). The FDA does regulate medical devices, and "device" is construed pretty broadly (condoms are non-exempt class 2 medical devices). There is FDA guidance on medical software which makes it clear that the device manufacturer shoulders the regulatory burden. Anytime you manufacture a tangible thing (which is within the scope of FDA regulation for medical devices), you have to have the thing approved. Many (most?) medical devices implement software, and are thus within the scope of FDA scrutiny. It is not illegal to write software that ends up being implemented in an unapproved medical device, but the unapproved medical device itself is illegal. It is reasonably likely that purported medical software (not a gadget with software build in) would be held to be a non-exempt device. To know if something is exempt, you would look at the exemptions list, and determine that your program (or thing) is not on or implied by anything on that list. The visual acuity eye chart is a class 1 exempt item, as is the manual toothbrush. There is no way to specifically look for things that are only software, or that contain software, so the search through the list would have to be guided by knowledge of the subject area. Canada is helpful in explaining when software is a regulated medical device. This is non-probative w.r.t. US law but gives you an idea what is likely to be considered a "device". Under Canadian law, the software would be clearly a regulated medical device. The FDA has a power-point that attempts to say something about the matter which warns you that you are on your own and "You will need to go back to study and use the source regulatory documents" to make the determination. Eventually, slide 13, they hint that if you intend the software to be used in diagnosis, prevention, or treatment, then it is a device (so, yes, the aforementioned software would be a device, and probably not exempt from regulations). General purpose software (word processors, web browsers, communications software, etc.) are not indented to be used for a regulated purpose, although they can be so used, and thus they are probably not subject to FDA regulation. There is a murky relationship between regulatory approval and liability. Being approved by the government does not convey immunity to negligence suits (see Wyeth v. Levine), but being approved can have weight in determining whether a party was negligent, since regulatory scrutiny ostensibly filters out errors that could have been caught. Federal approval does not preempt state tort law, as the court ruled. Regulations pertaining to medical devices hold for anything that qualifies as a device, and is not defined (negatively) in terms of disclaimers. If you sell a medical device but label it saying "this is not a medical device, it is not created by a competent medical practitioner", that doesn't make it not a medical device. Unfortunately, what counts as a regulated device is based on intended use, and there is an obvious connection between disclaimers and intentions. Taking MS Word as an example, MS does not as far as I know say that "Word is not intended to be used as a medical device". It can certainly be used to diagnose, teat, and prevent medical conditions, but so too can a screw driver or pretty much anything else. The number of non-medical uses vastly outweigh the medical uses, so it would be deemed not to be a regulated device. A program which prescribed a set of prayers to be uttered in case of illness would be subject to First Amendment override of any FDA regulations. Quack medical devices are prohibited (that's why there is regulation of devices in the first place), but discerning the fine line between permitted actions based on nutty beliefs and forbidden actions is not easy. The FDA also has guidance on the distinction between "Complementary and Alternative Medicine", which does not clearly state that, for example, a software reading of your cakra-energies based on a computer program's questions is not a medical device. They do say of mind-body medicine (mentioning yoga, biofeedback and tai chi as examples) that "CAM practices in this domain would not be subject to our jurisdiction under the Act or the PHS Act", but then say "any equipment or other products used as part of the practice of mind-body medicine may be subject to FDA regulation, depending on the nature of the product and its intended use" (hence a yoga-enabling program may be subject to regulation).
This is &quot;Topic #601&quot; in various ForwardHealth interpretative statements about BadgerCare Plus and Medicaid. The last 3 paragraphs say: When commercial health insurance plans require members to use a designated network of providers, non-network (i.e., providers who do not have a contract with the member's commercial health insurance plan) will be reimbursed by the commercial health insurance plan only if they obtain a referral or provide an emergency service. Except for emergency services and covered services that are not covered under the commercial health insurance plan, members enrolled in both a commercial health insurance plan and BadgerCare Plus or Wisconsin Medicaid (i.e., state-contracted MCO (managed care organization), fee-for-service) are required to receive services from providers affiliated with the commercial health insurance plan. In this situation, providers are required to refer the members to the commercial health insurance plan's network providers. This is necessary because commercial health insurance is always primary to BadgerCare Plus. BadgerCare Plus and Wisconsin Medicaid will not reimburse the provider if the commercial health insurance plan denied or would deny payment because a service otherwise covered under the commercial health insurance plan was performed by a provider outside the plan. In addition, if a member receives a covered service outside their commercial health insurance plan, the provider cannot collect payment from the member. If we take these statements by the Dept. of Health Services as correct interpretations of the law, then it seems that their interpretation is correct: &quot;providers are required to refer the members to the commercial health insurance plan's network providers&quot; (you as a patient have no choice) and &quot;the provider cannot collect payment from the member&quot; (they are encouraged to refer you to a network provider, because they are prohibited by law from taking payment from you). If you had received the services from the provider and not mentioned any insurance, this would have been treated as a normal doctor-patient case, and they would not know that the state would prohibit them from receiving payment from you. By going through the motions with insurance, I regret to say that you exposed them to relevant knowledge which they cannot take back or deny. The fraud would be between the provider and the state, via the provider's relation with this program. That does not endorse the DHS legal interpretation, but since they are the ones who wrote the regulations, it is fairly likely that (by definition) they got it right.
In the US, the most wide-spread proscription against a medical treatment (broadly construed) is that only 10 of 50 states allow physician-assisted suicide. In Washington v. Glucksberg (one of the states that subsequently made such suicides legal), SCOTUS affirms that such a law does not violate the Due Process Clause. Given a historical analysis, the court concludes that an &quot;asserted 'right' to assistance in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause&quot;. O'Connor in her concurring opinion further states that &quot;There is no dispute that dying patients in Washington and New York can obtain palliative care, even when doing so would hasten their deaths&quot;, but this falls short of a ruling that a person has a protected liberty interest in seeking medical care. Cruzan v. Director affirms that &quot;[a] competent person has a liberty interest under the Due Process Clause in refusing unwanted medical treatment&quot; (also noting that &quot;informed consent&quot; may derive from common law or specific state constitutions). Reciting prior reasoning on Due Process and medical treatment and referring to Jacobson v. Massachusetts (smallpox case), they note that &quot;the Court balanced an individual's liberty interest in declining an unwanted smallpox vaccine against the State's interest in preventing disease&quot;. There seems to be a dearth of cases affirming a protected liberty interest in seeking a particular medical procedure. Were the court to announce a fundamental right to seek some medical treatment, that right could still be subordinated to the states compelling interest in preventing some harm associated with a medical procedure, with legal review being carried out under a strict scrutiny standard. It should be borne in mind that Congress does limit access to drugs and devices, hence there is no constitutionally-protected right to take LSD as a treatment for mental problems. To the extent that a procedure relies on a (not-yet approved) device, that device must be approved by the FDA.
Charged? Of course, the police can charge you with anything at any time Could you be convicted? Maybe. Their best shot is charging you with “Manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act” also called constructive manslaughter. The Crown must prove your act: was intentional, was unlawful, leads the reasonable person to realise that some other person is at risk of physical harm, and caused the death. The first two are uncontestable: the protesters are deliberately engaging in an illegal act. No 3 would be up to the jury. No 4 is also up to the jury and would turn on the evidence that the delay to the ambulance caused the death.