Читать книгу A Dentist’s Guide to the Law - American Dental Association - Страница 9

A wide array of legal issues confronts dentists and their dental teams during the course of their day-to-day practices. Sometimes these issues involve particularly thorny questions about practice management or patient care. This book is here to help. It provides basic legal information on questions that oral health care practitioners have about their practices.

No book could possibly cover every dental legal issue. The topics covered here are those that dentists have frequently asked us over the years.

It’s important for you to know both what this book is and what it is not:

• The purpose of the publication is to provide basic answers to frequently asked legal questions. Its focus is on issues confronting dentists and their dental teams in private practice. However, we believe that many of the questions and answers in this book will also be useful for dentists who work in different arenas of the profession, including education and research.

• The answers to the frequently asked questions are informational only, and not a substitute for legal advice. Laws change, and, even more importantly, legal advice requires a careful assessment of the facts of a particular situation, which is then measured against all applicable laws. We don’t have all the facts about cases you may be wondering about, and we are not experts in, or able to provide legal advice about, your state law. Indeed, we are not license to practice law outside of Illinois, and we cannot provide personal legal advice with respect to Illinois law, for that matter. We will give you as much information as we reasonably can, but you must consult your lawyer for legal advice.

• Our focus in this book is on federal law. The book references state law in general terms where appropriate, but it is important for you to turn to your state dental society or personal attorney — or perhaps your malpractice carrier — for specific federal, state and local legal information that may apply to you.

• Oftentimes, dentists will ask ADA attorneys questions such as “Should I sign this contract?”, “Should I join this plan?”, or “Should I fire my HIV-infected hygienist?” This book answers questions from a legal frame. It does not focus on “shoulds” in the sense of ethical, business, or practice considerations. By telling you what the law says, we hope you will have a better context for factoring in ethics and practice perspectives.

Which leads us to the first question: