Two New Jersey healthcare facilities that violated the New Jersey Patient Safety Act, N.J.S.A. §§ 26:2H-12.23 to -12.25, (PSA), must provide plaintiff patients with internal reports and documents relating to adverse events, which would otherwise be privileged, the New Jersey Supreme Court held on August 5, 2024 in a decision involving two separate cases.
Both patients allegedly suffered injuries at senior care facilities in New Jersey, and sued for various allegations, including negligence and violations of New Jersey patient protection laws. In both matters, the patients sought internal documents regarding the incidents, but the defendant facilities asserted that the requested internal materials were not discoverable pursuant to the PSA’s self-critical-analysis privilege, which protects certain internal communications from discovery in litigation. See N.J.S.A. §§ 26:2H-12.25(b), (c), (f), (g). The trial courts in both matters found that the “self-critical-analysis privilege” under the PSA did not apply, and ordered defendants to disclose the materials. The Appellate Division reversed, finding that the defendants did comply with the PSA’s procedural requirements thus, the documents were privileged.
Justice Pierre-Louis wrote for the Supreme Court in upholding the trial courts’ findings, explaining that the regulations corresponding to the PSA require that a facility’s patient safety committee operate independently from any other committee in the facility. See N.J.A.C. 8:43E-10.4(c)(4). The Supreme Court, however, found that the facilities combined quality assurance and improvement with their patient safety committees. In coming to its conclusion, the Court reviewed and discussed the PSA and the recent case of Brugaletta v. Garcia, 234 N.J. 225, 247 (2018), which addressed the PSA’s requirements for evaluating a healthcare facility’s invocation of the self-critical analysis privilege.
The Supreme Court ultimately acknowledged the importance of the competing interests between a patient’s right to know what occurred in an adverse event and a healthcare facility’s interest in effective self-critical analysis to promote patient safety without disclosure of confidential material. Ultimately, the Supreme Court held that the PSA’s protective privilege around the process of performing a self-critical analysis is broad but that procedural compliance must be present for it to apply. The ruling sets forth important precedent showing that a facility’s failure to follow the PSA’s procedures could result in the loss of the protective privilege.
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