Unlike the other contributions to this issue, this paper is concerned with the prospects and potential ramifications of implementing interprofessional practice from the legal standpoint. The authors focus on the two forums where the major legal issues are likely to be played out: the laws under which health care professionals are regulated; and the law of professional malpractice as applied by the courts under the tort of negligence. The goal is to examine the regulatory and medico-legal barriers that might prevent or inhibit health care professionals from working together on an interprofessional basis, and to forecast the kinds of changes within legal systems which will be necessary to accommodate the change. The first part of the paper focuses on the legal regimes which govern the Canadian health care system, and argues that the essential integrity of the system of professional self-regulation must be protected in programs of reform that seek to create space for interprofessional practice. The authors also propose a number of specific initiatives of review and legislative change as examples of the role that legal reform can play in the shift to a culture of interprofessional regulation. The second part of the paper focuses on malpractice law and suggests that, while in the long term the superior quality of care brought about by interprofessional practice should produce less liability, in the short term interprofessional practice may fit uneasily within the legal constructs traditionally employed by the courts to evaluate malpractice claims. The authors propose three strategies designed to minimize this risk.
A recent and prominent American appeals court case has revived a controversial international law question: can a state compel a person on its territory to obtain and produce material that the person owns or controls, but which is stored on the territory of a foreign state? The case involved, United States v Microsoft, features electronic data stored offshore that was sought in the context of a criminal prosecution. It highlights the current legal complexity surrounding the cross-border gathering of electronic evidence, which has produced friction and divergent state practice. The author here contends that the problems involved are best understood — and potentially resolved — via an examination through the lens of the public international law of jurisdiction and, specifically, the prohibition of extraterritorial enforcement jurisdiction. An analysis of state practice reveals that unsanctioned cross-border evidence gathering is viewed by states as an intrusion on territorial sovereignty, engaging the prohibition, and that this view properly extends to the kind of state activity dealt with in the Microsoft Ireland case.
The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate three modes of home-based parent training, designed to teach parents to be the primary therapist of their preschool handicapped children. Subjects (N = 40) were rondomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions. Subjects assigned to conditions 2, 3, and 4 were given instructional materials necessary for teaching their handicapped children four developmental skills that they had not yet acquired. Pretest and posttest data were collected on parental training skills. A 4 x 4 x 2 ANOVA for repeated measures supported three conclusions: (1) parents do learn the behavioral strategies necessary to train their handicapped children; (2) televised programming is equally efficient as print media In transmitting the bellavioral strategies which parents employ; and (3) when televised programming is combined with the traditional print media, parental apprehension of training skills is significantly better than with either media alone.
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