In a 2-1 decision, the Court of Appeals for the First District of Texas has refused to issue a writ of mandamus directing a lower court to vacate its order compelling arbitration.

Elayne E. Greenberg, Assistant Dean for Dispute Resolution, Professor of Legal Practice, and Director of the Hugh L. Carey Center for Dispute Resolution at St. John’s University School of Law, has written an interesting article titled “Acts Like a Lawyer, Talks Like a Lawyer… Non-Lawyer Advocates Representing Parties in Dispute Resolution,” NYSBA New York Dispute Resolution Lawyer, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 2018); St. John’s Legal Studies Research Paper 18-0011 (May 21, 2018). 

The Southern District of Texas in Houston has confirmed a $14 million arbitration award in an international oil and gas dispute. 

David L. Noll, Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law, has published an interesting article titled “Public Litigation, Private Arbitration?” 18 Nev. L.J. 477 (2018). 

By Holly Hayes The Joint Commission Medical Staff Standard MS.01.01.01 has been approved and will go into effect March 31, 2011. See the Standard here. American Medical News summarizes: “The new standard states that the organized medical staff has the primary job of assuring quality and patient safety in the hospital while laying out a mechanism for physicians, the hospital governing body and chief executive to resolve differences over rules, policies and procedures. By spelling out these respective roles and responsibilities, the standard aims to foster collaborative working relationships to improve the quality of care. Medical staffs around the country will have to revise their bylaws in the next year to comply with the standard.” Read more here. With regard to the management of conflict, The Joint Commission introduction to the new standard states: “If conflict arises within the medical staff regarding medical staff bylaws, rules and regulations, or policies, it implements its process for managing internal conflict (see Element of Performance 10 — see below). If conflicts regarding the medical staff bylaws, rules and regulations, or policies arise between the governing body and the organized medical staff, the organization implements its conflict management processes, as set forth in the Leadership chapter.” Element of Performance 10 states: “The organized medical staff has a process which is implemented to manage conflict between the medical staff and the medical executive committee on issues including, but not limited to, proposals to adopt a rule, regulation, or policy or an amendment thereto. Nothing in the foregoing is intended to prevent medical staff members from communicating with the governing body on a rule, regulation, or policy adopted by the organized medical staff or the medical executive committee. The governing body determines the method of communication.” The Joint Commission recognition of the value of teamwork in the medical setting and the mandate for the development of a conflict resolution process is summarized as follows: “This collaborative relationship is critical to providing safe, high quality care in the hospital. While the governing body is ultimately responsible for the quality and safety of care at the hospital, the governing body, medical staff, and administration collaborate to provide safe, quality care. (Please see the Leadership chapter for more discussion of the relationship among the organized medical staff, administration, and governing body.)” See our posts on the Leadership chapter here and here. The requirement that “The organized medical staff has a process which is implemented to manage conflict…” validates the use of ADR techniques in health care. We welcome your comments to this new medical staff standard. Holly Hayes is a mediator at Karl Bayer, Dispute Resolution Expert where she focuses on mediation of health care disputes. Holly holds a B.A. from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Health Administration from Duke University. She can be reached at: holly@karlbayer.com.

By Holly Hayes The American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) held their annual national meeting in Chicago the week of March 22, 2010. During the meeting, Joseph Bujak, a physician and vice president of medical affairs at 246-bed Kootenai Medical Center, in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho and co-presenter Kathleen Bartholomew, a registered nurse and well-known author on nursing, acted out a unique role-playing presentation on doctor-nurse communication. See the full article here (free registration required). “In the opening skit Bartholomew phones Bujak, the on-call physician, at home in the early morning hours to ask whether she should adjust treatment in response to changing creatinine levels in a kidney failure patient. The physician berates the nurse for waking him, because she’s the fourth person to do so and because she doesn’t seem to even understand the clinical difference between rising and falling creatinine levels. ‘I’m surrounded by incompetents!’ Bujak says. ‘You’d have to be a Neanderthal to think I would put up with this abuse,’ Bartholomew tells the audience.” Both presenters agreed, one of the main reasons for physician-nurse communication problems was that doctors often don’t know the nurses. In our series on using mediation skills in the health care setting, we used an example of physician-nurse communication problems in Part I, where we highlighted the use of the principled negotiation method to resolve conflict. One of the key points in this method is separating the people from the problem as seen in Part II. In their book, Getting to YES, Roger Fisher and William Ury outline three categories to think about in terms of dealing with people: perceptions, emotions and communication. 1. Perceptions: In the doctor-nurse situation described above, the conflict exists because it exists in each side’s perceptions. If the nurse or the physician can put themselves in the other’s shoes, it allows them to gain useful information to help address the overriding patient care issues. 2. Emotions: When parties recognize and understand emotions, both theirs and the other persons, they are freed from the burden of unexpressed emotion and can more likely work on the problem. During the skit, it was stated, “nurses see doctors as being able to flout the rules, which destroys the sense of collegiality on which the new team-centered approach to healthcare relies.” If physician and nurse had better communication, the emotion around this issue could be recognized and addressed. 3. Communication: Skills that can be learned to improve communication include: listen actively and acknowledge what is said, speak to be understood, use “I” rather than “you”, and speak with a purpose in mind and communicate what purpose the information will serve. For more on using mediation techniques in healthcare, see our Part III, Part IV and Part V. Let us know if you have had any experience with disruptive healthcare providers and how it was addressed. Holly Hayes is a mediator at Karl Bayer, Dispute Resolution Expert where she focuses on mediation of health care disputes. Holly holds a B.A. from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Health Administration from Duke University. She can be reached at: holly@karlbayer.com.