This project examines the urgent and challenging question of how resource limitations regarding in-patient care caused by scarce financial means due to ever more advanced and expensive medicine, increasing life expectancy or unexpected external factors, such as a pandemic, have an impact on the obligations of hospitals with regard to organisation and treatment and, subsequently, affect the liability of hospitals vis-à-vis its patients.
The innovative starting point of the study is that the complex subject is examined from a comparative law perspective on the basis of a multi-angled approach. Accordingly, the study includes a selection of six European jurisdictions representative of the diversity of social insurance systems and liability principles applicable (Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Norway) as well as five special reports taking into account private insurance law, law and economics, ethics, intensive care medicine and hospital management.
The research results, will be of interest for practitioners and researchers as well as for endeavours to harmonise European tort law in this respect.
The project, which started in 2023, is conducted by ETL in cooperation with Karl Stöger (Institute for Constitutional and Administrative Law, Department of Medical Law, Vienna University) and ECTIL, and is co-led by Ernst Karner (ETL, ECTIL and Vienna University) and Karl Stöger.