Preventing medical malpractice in mid-20th-century Canada: CMPA and its approach to concerns about varicose vein treatments

摘要

The founding of the Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA) in 1901 was pivotal to Canadian medical malpractice law. At first, the CMPA was a small mutual defence organization that pooled membership fees to cover the costs of physicians facing malpractice litigation. In its early days, the association fiercely protected its members, framing patient-plaintiffs as "unscrupulous charlatans" and refusing to settle any case brought against its members. But by the late 1920s, it took on responsibility for paying damages awarded in lost court cases, and it began settling cases it deemed legally indefensible. At the same time, the organization asked its members to report threats of malpractice litigation (before any litigation had commenced) while also keeping track of trends in successful litigation. With this information, the association was well positioned to warn doctors about interventions that put the public at risk, and that also generated a risk to the association's bottom line. An example of the CMPA's risk- management strategy was its effort from the 1940s to the 1960s to warn practitioners about the dangers of varicose vein treatments.