응급환자의 법적 정의와 해당성 판단

According to the Emergency Medical Service Act, the term “emergency patient” means a patient incapable of preserving lives or facing with possibility to incur a grave mental or physical harm unless he or she undergoes a required first-aid treatment, or a person under corresponding case, due to disease, childbirth, injuries or other emergency conditions caused by accidents and disasters, and who is prescribed by the Ordinance of the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family affairs. Legal definition of emergency patient need interpretation to apply each case and that concept can decide the applicable range of the act such as prohibitions on refusal of emergency medical service, priority treatment, transfer and surrogate payment for outstanding amounts. Legal decisions on the definition of emergency patient requires a judgment of a patient’s medical conditions on whether the patient is stable or unstable that require emergency medical services. The presence of emergency medical conditions at first must be decided by referring to the definitions in the Emergency Medical Service Act and the cases on each specific matter. Only, when discussing liability of hospitals and doctors in emergency medical service, there needs to be consideration of whether those who made the decision that the patient has the emergency medical conditions at that time.