ABSTRACT
Poland is a country with an increasing number of claims based on medical errors, especially in the following surgical disciplines: obstetrics and gynaecology, orthopaedics and emergency medicine, general surgery. This problem raises the need to seek out-of-court dispute solutions beneficial to the physician, the patient and the national health care system. Mediation - a procedure commonly used and well-established in Polish law, however, not widespread, as far as medical claims are concerned - creates this opportunity. The purpose of this article is to summarize international experiences in mediation in physician-patient disputes, and to try to popularize them in Poland. An analysis of foreign literature has provided evidence that mediation is an effective tool to resolve disputes by compromise, while reducing the costs and time of proceedings, and preventing burnout among physicians and the patients' loss of trust in medical care.
