The American and Polish Legal Perspectives on Cases of Neurological Perinatal Damage – Selected Issues

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to present and analyze the method of compensation for a special type of medical damage – neurological perinatal damage – which arises in connection with childbirth and is neuropathological in nature. This damage is irreversible and the cost of medical care, which sometimes continues throughout the child’s entire life, is very high. Claims involving this type of damage generate the highest compensation amounts, which means, from the liability insurance point of view, that it is a “hard-to-insure” injury. This is true for both the Polish and US liability systems, even though they are legal orders apart. What we are dealing here is, on the one hand, the need to support the family of the injured child, so that, thanks to the money obtained, they can begin their treatment and rehabilitation as soon as possible, and on the other hand, the need to take into account the interests of gynecologists and obstetricians, so that their occupations do not become deficit occupations. The idea is to increase the sense of legal security for these socially important medical professions. Given the above, attempts to seek an alternative to the judicial model of liability as a means of compensating this type of medical damage should come as no surprise. An example of an alternative liability model is the legislation enacted in two US states: Virginia and Florida (so-called “slice” no-fault liability models). These models, in effect for more than 35 years, are described in the first part of the article. In the second part, the author compares them with the main principles of the Polish judicial model of liability and the extrajudicial model, which, due to recent amendments to the law have undergone a major transformation. Then (due to the comprehensiveness of the subject matter), using the example of selected representative court cases, the author analyses the types of compensation claims and the amounts of benefits awarded in cases of perinatal neurological damage. The discussion ends with conclusions comparing the US and Polish models.