The General Medical Council has issued definitive guidance on doctors' duties when they fear a child in their care is suffering from abuse. The GMC's 2012 Guidance on Child Protection came into effect on 3 September 2012 after a two-year working group - chaired by a senior family court Judge, the Right Honourable Lord Justice Thorpe - listened to evidence given by child protection experts ...
As courts cautiously resume in-person hearings across the country, there is looming uncertainty about when—or if—civil jury trials will ever resume. For instance, B.C. and some regions in Ontario have announced that civil jury trials are suspended until at least 2021—and Ontario is considering whether to abolish them altogether ...
We consider the first post Lloyd v Google decision considering loss of control damages under the GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 and its implications for the future of data and privacy litigation. It suddenly became much more difficult to bring collective privacy claims in England in November last year when Google succeeded in the Lloyd v Google litigation before the UK Supreme Court ...
Now that we have persevered through one year of the COVID-19 pandemic, much has been written about pandemic fatigue and associated social isolation, mental stress, and anxiety. Employers may be seeing an increase in the incidence of mental illness claims in their workplaces ...
Electronic cigarettes and vaping have been heralded by many as a safer alternative to smoking traditional cigarettes. An outbreak of illnesses last fall allegedly related to vaping, however, ignited public hysteria and will almost certainly lead to substantial mass tort litigation aimed at manufacturers of e-cigarette devices and vaping liquids ...
Pet owners do not get damages at law for the wrongful death of their pets, even when caused by fraudulent and unscrupulous profiteers. Should they? For many affluent “parents” of “furkids”, it is a familiar routine come Christmas or any other holiday season: stopping by at an expensive boarding facility on the way to the airport to drop off their precious pets, rather than leaving the cute critters home alone ...
The Department of Justice is stepping up its scrutiny of health-care fraud, especially in testing laboratories, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Former federal prosecutor Jason Mehta, a partner with Bradley, says now is not the time to tout profits over patient care and offers insights on compliance. In the midst of a global pandemic, much attention and praise is rightfully being showered on health-care providers ...
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on October 29, 2020 it reached a more than $9.2 million settlement with Medtronic USA Inc. to resolve allegations it violated the False Claims Act (FCA) and Open Payment Program.[1] Specifically, Medtronic agreed to pay $8.1 million to resolve FCA allegations it paid kickbacks to induce a South Dakota neurosurgeon to use its SynchroMed II intrathecal infusion pumps ...
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel recently released an advisory opinion[i] regarding Section 1461 of title 18 of the U.S. Code. In it, they write the “Comstock Act”[ii] does not prohibit the mailing of certain medications used to perform abortions where the sender does not believe the medications will be used unlawfully. This opinion comes in the wake of the U.S ...
On July 10, 2020, in United States v. Ruan, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the convictions of two Alabama doctors for running an opiate “pill mill.” Among many other things, the government charged that the doctors used “incident to” billing to charge Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama under the doctor’s identification for visits conducted entirely by nurse practitioners, which that insurer (unlike some others) prohibited under its policy ...
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Fraud Section released its 2021 annual report earlier this month, and the numbers show that the DOJ continues to ramp up enforcement despite ongoing logistical challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The annual report reflects only prosecutions handled by the DOJ’s Fraud Section itself (not all federal prosecutions handled by individual U.S ...
The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) withdrew three longstanding healthcare antitrust enforcement policy statements on the afternoon of Friday, February 3, 2023. The move follows a series of White House antitrust initiatives ...
This week, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued final rules to expand access to “Association Health Plans” for small businesses that are unaffiliated, but are in the same line of business or geographic area. An “Association Health Plan” or “AHP” is a group health plan adopted by members of an employer group or association to provide health coverage for their employees ...
In EBSA Disaster Relief Notice 2021-01, the Department of Labor (DOL) has issued a critical interpretation of prior guidance that extended certain deadlines for employee benefit plans, participants, and beneficiaries due to COVID-19. We discussed the original guidance in this prior article ...
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) recently released streamlined forms employers may use to coordinate leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) ...
The United States Supreme Court has held an individual’s private right of action to sue a public nursing home for violations of federally protected rights in Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County v. Talevski. The Court held that a private individual could sue for rights protected by the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act (“NHRA”), which sets the federal minimum quality standards for nursing homes to ensure that seniors receive quality care ...
Artificial intelligence technologies are extremely promising in healthcare.1 By examining, cross-referencing and comparing a phenomenal amount of data.2 AI lets researchers work more quickly at a lower cost3 and facilitates doctors’ decision-making with regard to diagnosis, treatment and choice of prescription. The integration of AI into the healthcare field can take various forms:4 Management of electronic medical records (e.g ...
The access to records clause, sometimes called the inspection or audit clause, is a common fixture in reinsurance agreements and serves an important function. It enables the reinsurer to track the performance of the agreement and maintain an accurate view of the business ceded. More specifically, it allows the reinsurer to ensure the cedent is complying with the terms and conditions of the agreement, including timely reporting of losses and calculation of premiums ...
May 15, 2023 By: Meghna Parikh The expiration of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (“PHE”) on May 11, 2023 could have created a “prescription cliff” leaving patients without access to controlled substances. During the PHE, telemedicine flexibilities allowed patients to have access to Schedule II and narcotic controlled substances via telemedicine without a prior in-person medical evaluation ...
There are a number of reasons why parties who have agreed to arbitrate disputes (ordinarily by way of an arbitration clause in a contract) may later wish to litigate their dispute in the UAE courts. A common reason is the cost of arbitration, which can be quite significant compared to the cost of litigating in the UAE Courts ...
In a decision issued in July 2021, the Dubai Court of Appeal held that an arbitration clause should be construed narrowly, and emphasized that everything that may be waived or prevents its [i.e., the arbitration clause’s] application must be sought. This judgment, which rejected a challenge to the jurisdiction of the Dubai Courts based on the existence of a purported arbitration agreement, was discussed in our inBrief dated 12 September 2021 ...
Article 319(1) of the UAE Civil Procedure Law authorises an execution judge to imprison a debtor who fails to satisfy a judgment debt, unless the debtor is able to prove that he is insolvent. Although the text of Article 319(1) places the burden of proving insolvency on the judgment debtor, this appears to have been reversed following a decision of the General Assembly of the Dubai Court of Cassation issued in October 2023 ...
