I. Introduction & Background

Since 2000, along with the continuous growth of medical services, the number and severity of medical disputes has been rising continuously. For the purposes of preventing and addressing medical disputes, a number of normative documents have been issued. Such documents aim, in particular, to address the verbosity of judicial redress, the hardship of obtaining compensation and the intensification of doctor-patient relationships.

Despite being the primary regulation applicable to medical disputes arising from medical accidents, the Regulation on the Handling of Medical Accidents has failed to address several outstanding problems in such medical disputes, some of which give rise to heated social discussions, such as the Yulin puerpera incident and the Longgang “forced kneeling” incident . Since the term “medical disputes” covers a wider range of cases than “medical accidents” and because the State Council deemed it necessary to summarize the judicial experiences of preventing and handling medical disputes, the Regulation on the Prevention and Handling of Medical Disputes, as the new regulation, was issued by the State Council on July 31, 2018 and became effective on Oct. 1, 2018. This note will mainly introduce the advancement of the new regulation by comparing with the prior ones.