Hospital liability for the right reasons: a non-delegable duty to provide support services.

The goal of the tort system can be reduced to one basic principle: the judiciary imposes legal responsibility on certain actors for certain conduct in order to remedy past harms and influence prospective behavior. Over the course of its existence, our judiciary has designated particular actors deserving of legal responsibility for various reasons. Guiding this imposition, however, is the will and perception of the general public. Because legal responsibility is attributed, in large part, on the basis of public perception, the community of actors to which it applies will change in step with those interests and activities that our society deems most important. One of the most recent—and most dramatic—changes to our tort system concerns the judiciary’s imposition of legal responsibility on hospitals for the negligent conduct of independent contractor physicians. The medical community’s ability to offer safe and effective healthcare services has improved significantly since the turn of the twentieth century. Aided by advanced technologies, medical professionals are now more capable of providing local communities with quality care. Through the eyes of the treated public, this development has been most clearly witnessed within the landscape of hospital operations. So influenced by the public recognition of hospitals as vessels for medical treatment, such institutions have endeavored to distinguish themselves in the healthcare field. This undertaking has been marked by increased self-advertising and overall commercialization of