Opinion ID: 3134232
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Ill 2d 282, 293 (1980) (duty concerns hospital's responsibilities

Text: that are administrative or managerial); IPI Civil 3d No. 105.03.01, Notes on Use (ordinarily, this duty involves the hospital's own management responsibility); see also Johnson v. St. Bernard Hospital, 79 Ill. App. 3d 709, 718 (1979) ([i]t requires not medical expertise, but administrative expertise, to enforce rules and regulations adopted to ensure smoothly run hospital and adequate patient care); Pedroza v. Bryant, 101 Wash. 226, 677 P.2d 166 (1984) (Darling first introduced doctrine of hospital's corporate negligence founded on responsibility to supervise and review medical treatment provided by medical staff). This duty has been found based on claims that a hospital administrated X-ray therapy (see Greenberg, 83 Ill. 2d at 293); failed to require treatment and consultation by specialists, and failed to review physicians' qualifications and competencies (Andrews v. Northwestern Memorial Hospital, 184 Ill. App. 3d 486, 489 (1989)); or failed to make available a specially trained nurse for its nursery (Northern Trust Co. v. Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital, 143 Ill. App. 3d 479 (1986)). A hospital, in fulfilling this duty, must conform to the legal standard of reasonable conduct in light of the apparent risk. See Ohligschlager v. Proctor Community Hospital, 55 Ill. 2d 411, 420 (1973); Darling, 33 Ill. 2d at 331; see also IPI Civil 3d No. 105.03.01, Notes on Use (a duty to exercise ordinary care). What a hospital must do to satisfy the duty is act as would a reasonably careful hospital under circumstances similar to those shown by the evidence. See IPI Civil 3d No. 105.03.01, Notes on Use (directing the additional use of a modified IPI Civil 3d No. 10.02). Whether a hospital is reasonably careful may be shown by a wide variety of evidence, including, but not limited to, expert testimony, hospital bylaws, statutes, accreditation standards, custom and community practice. Darling, 33 Ill. 2d 326; Andrews v. Northwestern Memorial Hospital, 184 Ill. App. 3d 486 (1989). When IPI Civil 3d No. 10.02 is used to instruct a jury, as in the present case, the jury is told that it decides how a reasonably careful hospital would act. Thus, a hospital's conduct is measured against what a lay jury considers reasonable under the circumstances. In contrast, the standard of care applied to hospitals in cases based on their vicarious liability for the conduct of agent or employee medical professionals remains the standard applied to all professionals, i.e., to use that same degree of knowledge, skill and ability as an ordinarily careful professional would exercise under similar circumstances. See IPI Civil 3d No. 105.03.01, Notes on Use (directing that IPI Civil 3d No. 105.01 be used rather than No. 105.03.01 in cases of vicarious liability for the conduct of professionals). In contrast, also, to the duty instruction used for hospital institutional negligence, the traditional professional duty instruction directs the jury that it may not attempt to assess a defendant's conduct from any personal knowledge. See IPI Civil 3d Nos. 105.01, 105.02. UBS views its development and implementation of a blood screening policy in the face of AIDS as distinguished from the administrative or managerial responsibilities carried out by hospitals under Darling. UBS asserts that its allegedly negligent conduct in developing policy and practices for screening the blood supply concerned matters involving medical judgment. Plaintiff responds that in Greenberg, 83 Ill. 2d at 293, a hospital case, this court, applying the standard of care utilized in Darling, acknowledged that such responsibilities involve medical judgment. Plaintiff therefore concludes that the standard of care applied in Darling and Greenberg must hold sway here. Plaintiff additionally claims that the record here demonstrates that a professional standard of care should not apply under section 3. According to plaintiff, UBS's top corporate officer had ultimate authority for its AIDS procedures; several of UBS's donor screening and high-risk blood testing policies and procedures were set forth in memoranda written by businessmen; the blood drive at issue here was not conducted under the supervision of a physician; and the person who screened John Donor was not a licensed medical professional. Plaintiff claims that the fact that UBS's medical director is a licensed physician should not convert a negligence action against UBS as an entity into a professional malpractice action. The distinction between the legislature's approval of the professional standard of care in section 3 as the measure of a blood bank's allegedly negligent activities in collecting blood and Darling's use of a reasonableness standard of care encompasses more than the matter of medical judgment. Darling imposed negligence liability upon health care institutions, including hospitals, that had not existed previously under common law. The area of liability recognized by Darling does not encompass, whatsoever, a hospital's responsibility for the conduct of its agent or employee medical professionals. By contrast, the statutory liability imposed by section 3 upon human blood, organ and tissue service providers ([e]very person, firm or corporation involved) in procuring, furnishing, donating, processing, distributing or using whole blood includes responsibility for the conduct of agent and employee medical professionals. See Ill. Rev. Stat. 1983, ch. 111½, pars. 5102, 5103. Notably, where a hospital is held responsible for the conduct of its agent or employee medical professionals, under vicarious liability, a hospital's conduct is measured, as in section 3, against a professional standard of care. Furthermore, the legislature was presumably aware of Darling when it enacted the Blood Shield Act. See 2B N. Singer, Sutherland on Statutory Construction §50.01, at 90 (5th ed. 1992). Yet, despite Darling's creation of a form of negligence liability, utilizing a reasonableness standard of care, and arguably applicable to human blood, tissue and organ service provider institutions, the legislature saw fit to enact both sections 2 and 3, setting out negligence liability with a different scope. The fact that human blood, tissue and organ service providers bear direct responsibility for the conduct of medical professionals, and that hospitals, under Darling, do not, directly implicates the standard of care against which their conduct may be measured. As discussed previously, a professional standard of care is traditionally utilized to judge professional conduct and clearly, under the Act, the conduct of blood banks includes that of its medical professional staff. Moreover, the legislature also expressly recognized that the actual activities of human blood, tissue and organ service providers involves a level of medical judgment sufficient to warrant statutory protection. See Ill. Rev. Stat. 1983, ch. 111½, par. 5101. That the statutory protection curtailed the imposition of strict liability, but not negligence liability, does not diminish the legislature's view of the significance of medical judgment in this arena. By contrast, Greenberg only reveals this court's acknowledgment that part of a hospital's administration involves medical judgment. Greenberg, 83 Ill. 2d at 293. The Greenberg court made this acknowledgment within the confines of rejecting the evidentiary rule which requires that adverse expert witnesses, testifying to medical negligence, be licensed in the same school of medicine as the defendant (see Dolan v. Galluzzo, 77