Bioethics and Medical Litigation in France: An Exploratory Study

Medical litigation is a matter of particular concern for hospitals. We decided to examine whether bioethics might offer additional insights into these disputes.

We conducted a highly exploratory and descriptive study in empirical bioethics, relying exclusively on a sample of scientific articles addressing medical litigation in France and primarily derived from real-world healthcare settings. Analysis proceeded manually in three stages: (i) a content analysis of the sample; (ii) a thematic analysis of the collected information; and (iii) a bio-ethical analysis of the identified themes and codes, and collected information.

We ultimately derived three broader themes, presented in descending order of importance: "Legal Claims", "Poor Practices", and "Specific Laws". Informed by these themes, but also associated codes and collected information, we may already infer several ethical tensions between responsibility-but understood here as a fundamental moral value rather than a simple legal obligation to account for one's professional actions-and a wide range of health and life science practices, most of which relate to surgical interventions to dis day. However, it remains difficult to determine whether these tensions reflect a single macro-bio-ethical issue-that is, an ethical tension or dilemma between health and/or life science practices and moral values and/or standards at a societal or country level-or rather a set of distinct micro-bio-ethical issues-arising at the level of given individuals or institutions.

Bioethics warrants closer engagement with such disputes, insofar as they might embody bio-ethical issues of sufficient significance.