Public Health Law Map - Beta 5 - Medical and Public Health Law Site

the development of new legal theories. This has been the case, prompting the
Congress to pass a law reducing legal attacks on peer review actions.
2. The Legal Status of Medical Staff Committees
A hospital medical staff is an unusual entity. It serves the interests of the hospital but
is not part of the hospital corporation. Because most states place limits on the ability
of physicians to work for hospitals directly, the hospital usually does not employ or
control the actions of the members of the committee. The medical staff is legally
separate from the constituent physicians’ practices. They may engage in joint
decision making for the hospital, but they are not a joint venture with the hospital. It
is important to note that the courts have found that the members of a hospital medical
staff are, by definition, a conspiracy.
This view was articulated in Weiss v. York Hospital, [Weiss v. York Hosp., 745 F.2d
786 (3d. Cir. 1984).] an antitrust case. The plaintiff in Weiss had sued some of the
individual physicians on the medical staff, but he had also sued the medical staff
itself as an independent entity. The court found that the medical staff had no
independent legal existence but accepted the plaintiff’s allegation that the individual
physicians were engaged in a conspiracy as defined in section 1 of the Sherman
Antitrust Act:
We agree with the Plaintiffs that, as a matter of law, the medical staff is a
combination of individual doctors and therefore that any action taken by the
medical staff satisfies the “contract, combination, or conspiracy” requirement
of section 1. [Weiss at 815.]
The key to this case is the distinction between the medical staff as an entity unto
itself and the individual physicians who make up the medical staff. Although the trial
court instructed the jury that the medical staff was an “unincorporated division” of
the hospital and thus the two were a “single entity,” incapable of conspiring, it was
careful to distinguish the actions of the individual members of the medical staff:
The Court also instructed the jury, however, that if they found that some or
all of the individual Defendants took action against the Plaintiffs “in whole or
in part in their individual capacities and motivated in whole or in part by
independent personal economic interests, then such individual- named
Defendants are, under the law, independent economic entities … legally
capable of conspiring with York Hospital or its Medical and Dental Staff.”
[Weiss at 813.]
In the case of Quinn v. Kent General Hospital, [Quinn v. Kent Gen’l Hosp., 716 F.
Supp. 1226 (1985).] the court expanded on this distinction between the medical staff
and the individual physicians:
It is certainly true that, regardless of their specialty, the members of the
Hospital’s active medical staff have a financial interest in limiting the
number of physicians admitted to active staff privileges at the Hospital, for
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