The Law and Health Care Practice

Please note that this Course has Requisites listed.

Offering Information

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Course Description

This course aims to provide students with the specialised knowledge and skills required to better meet their legal, ethical and professional obligations in increasingly modernising and complex health care systems and service delivery environments. Keeping up to date with laws, regulations and professional standards are critical to decision-making in health care practice. Unlawful and unsafe practices can have dire consequences for both patients and practitioners. Optimum health care practice requires legal and ethical frameworks that practitioners can apply when confronted by workplace dilemmas.

Nurses and midwives need to fulfill their legal, ethical, and professional obligations as part of everyday practice, which is challenging in Australia's contemporary and dynamic health care system. This course will provide nurses and midwives with the knowledge, skills, and attributes they need to meet this challenge and be successful in fulfilling their obligations.

Topics

1. Perspective of law in a health care context 2. Overview of legal and ethical frameworks in Australia 3. Civil law and liability 4. Criminal law and liability 5. Professional regulation, complaints and procedural fairness 6. Managing risk in health care practice

Availability

Toowoomba

Course Contacts

Dianne Stratton-Maher

Enrolment Rules

Course Pre-requisites

When planning your enrolment, you might come across terms like prerequisite, corequisite, and anti-requisite. These are important to understand because they affect which courses you can take and when.

Prerequisite

A prerequisite is a course you must complete before enrolling in another course. It ensures you have the necessary background knowledge and skills to succeed in the next course.

Corequisite

A corequisite is a course that you need to take at the same time as another course, or before it. These courses complement each other and are often required together in professionally accredited programs.

Anti-requisite

An anti-requisite is a course that has very similar content to another course. You can’t enrol in both because it wouldn’t benefit your learning to repeat the same material.

Enrolment Requirements

Other

Assessments

Annotated bibliography

Case Study

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this course, graduates will be able to:

Apply a knowledge of the legal system in Australia, and the laws, policies, and regulations, to health care practice;

Critically review contemporary law and health literatures to inform legal, ethical, and professional health care practice;

Utilise critical analysis skills to problem solve, in the context of complex clinical practice scenarios;

Apply self-reflection processes to evaluate and respond to possible legal, ethical, or professional risks in the health care environment;

Employ a realistic application of theories and principles of law and ethics to the design of reasoned responses to critical incidents in health care practice.

UniSQ Handbook

NUR6340 - The Law and Health Care Practice

1 Unit