A Truly No-Fault Approach to Treatment Injury Cover in Accident Compensation

<p>New Zealand’s accident compensation system is ‘no-fault’, meaning that New Zealanders are compensated for their injuries whether or not they can find someone to blame for their misfortune. However, until 2005, claimants injured while receiving medical treatment had to show either that their injuries were caused by negligence, or that their injuries were both rare and severe. The negligence standard was taken from tort law, and required the claimant to show that the injury was a registered health professional’s fault. This fault requirement created many of the problems that tort law had in the past: it was inefficient, arbitrary, and created a blaming culture that bred hostility between the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), the injured, and health professionals. In 2004, ACC published a review of the medical misadventure provisions, calling for them to be replaced by no-fault compensation provisions in line with the spirit and content of the rest of the accident compensation scheme. In 2005, medical misadventure became treatment injury, and both application and acceptance rates rose for claims concerning injuries received during medical treatment. However, the treatment injury provisions still contained fault elements, despite the legislature’s claim that the provisions were no-fault. In this paper, I will address the role of fault in a compensation scheme for those injured during medical treatment. First, I will define fault in its tort law context and outline some strengths and weaknesses of fault as a legal concept. Then, I will provide a short overview of New Zealand’s accident compensation scheme, the medical misadventure provisions, the push for reform, and the structure of the treatment injury provisions. This will give background to an in-depth discussion of the treatment injury provisions’ incorporation of fault standards. Also relevant to this discussion is the accident compensation scheme’s reporting mechanism, which potentially complicates ACC’s role as purely an injury compensating, preventing and rehabilitating body. Finally, it is necessary to consider whether compensation itself is inherently fault-based, an argument raised by some commentators. My conclusion is that some aspects of the treatment injury provisions still use fault to determine cover in some situations. The provisions give particular weight to the fault of the claimant in causing her own injury. This use of fault standards can be removed from the treatment injury provisions with some minor amendments, which are set out at the end of this paper.</p>

A Truly No-Fault Approach to Treatment Injury Cover in Accident Compensation

<p>New Zealand’s accident compensation system is ‘no-fault’, meaning that New Zealanders are compensated for their injuries whether or not they can find someone to blame for their misfortune. However, until 2005, claimants injured while receiving medical treatment had to show either that their injuries were caused by negligence, or that their injuries were both rare and severe. The negligence standard was taken from tort law, and required the claimant to show that the injury was a registered health professional’s fault. This fault requirement created many of the problems that tort law had in the past: it was inefficient, arbitrary, and created a blaming culture that bred hostility between the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), the injured, and health professionals. In 2004, ACC published a review of the medical misadventure provisions, calling for them to be replaced by no-fault compensation provisions in line with the spirit and content of the rest of the accident compensation scheme. In 2005, medical misadventure became treatment injury, and both application and acceptance rates rose for claims concerning injuries received during medical treatment. However, the treatment injury provisions still contained fault elements, despite the legislature’s claim that the provisions were no-fault. In this paper, I will address the role of fault in a compensation scheme for those injured during medical treatment. First, I will define fault in its tort law context and outline some strengths and weaknesses of fault as a legal concept. Then, I will provide a short overview of New Zealand’s accident compensation scheme, the medical misadventure provisions, the push for reform, and the structure of the treatment injury provisions. This will give background to an in-depth discussion of the treatment injury provisions’ incorporation of fault standards. Also relevant to this discussion is the accident compensation scheme’s reporting mechanism, which potentially complicates ACC’s role as purely an injury compensating, preventing and rehabilitating body. Finally, it is necessary to consider whether compensation itself is inherently fault-based, an argument raised by some commentators. My conclusion is that some aspects of the treatment injury provisions still use fault to determine cover in some situations. The provisions give particular weight to the fault of the claimant in causing her own injury. This use of fault standards can be removed from the treatment injury provisions with some minor amendments, which are set out at the end of this paper.</p>

Robust Control Optimization Based on Actuator Fault and Sensor Fault Compensation for Mini Motion Package Electro-Hydraulic Actuator

In recent years, electro-hydraulic systems have been widely used in many industries and have attracted research attention because of their outstanding characteristics such as power, accuracy, efficiency, and ease of maintenance. However, such systems face serious problems caused simultaneously by disturbances, internal leakage fault, sensor fault, and dynamic uncertain equation components, which make the system unstable and unsafe. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the estimation of system fault and uncertainties with the aid of advanced fault compensation techniques. First, we design a sliding mode observer using the Lyapunov algorithm to estimate actuator faults that produce not only internal leakage fault but also disturbances or unknown input uncertainties. These faults occur under the effect of payload variations and unknown friction nonlinearities. Second, Lyapunov analysis-based unknown input observer model is designed to estimate sensor faults arising from sensor noises and faults. Third, to minimize the estimated faults, a combination of actuator and sensor compensation fault is proposed, in which the compensation process is performed due to the difference between the output signal and its estimation. Finally, the numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method obtained under various faulty scenarios. The simulation results show that the efficiency of the proposed solution is better than the traditional PID controller and the sensor fault compensation method, despite the influence of noises.

Accident Compensation in Swiss and New Zealand Law: Some Selected Issues That Undermine the Purpose in Both Schemes

<p>This dissertation analyses selected issues that undermine the coherence and the purposes of the Swiss and New Zealand accident compensation schemes. Unlike other European states the Swiss accident compensation provides cover for non-work related accidental injury, which makes it a useful subject of comparison with the New Zealand accident compensation scheme which provides a comprehensive, no fault compensation scheme for personal injury. In undertaking a largely comparative approach the paper argues that both schemes have drifted away considerably from the original underlying purpose to provide compensation for work incapacity and, on the other hand, to restore the claimant to a level of work capacity as soon as possible. This thesis is illustrated by examining the vulnerability of the schemes to political change, the arbitrary dichotomy between incapacity to work caused by accidental injury and incapacity caused by sickness, the definitions of an accident in both schemes and the assessment of evidence. The paper finds that both schemes should be amended and suggests alternative approaches for each issue.</p>

Accident Compensation in Swiss and New Zealand Law: Some Selected Issues That Undermine the Purpose in Both Schemes

<p>This dissertation analyses selected issues that undermine the coherence and the purposes of the Swiss and New Zealand accident compensation schemes. Unlike other European states the Swiss accident compensation provides cover for non-work related accidental injury, which makes it a useful subject of comparison with the New Zealand accident compensation scheme which provides a comprehensive, no fault compensation scheme for personal injury. In undertaking a largely comparative approach the paper argues that both schemes have drifted away considerably from the original underlying purpose to provide compensation for work incapacity and, on the other hand, to restore the claimant to a level of work capacity as soon as possible. This thesis is illustrated by examining the vulnerability of the schemes to political change, the arbitrary dichotomy between incapacity to work caused by accidental injury and incapacity caused by sickness, the definitions of an accident in both schemes and the assessment of evidence. The paper finds that both schemes should be amended and suggests alternative approaches for each issue.</p>

Fault compensation effect in fault detection and isolation

<p class="Abstract">This paper discusses the origin and problem of the fault compensation effect. The fault compensation effect is an underrated common side effect of the fault isolation approaches developed within the Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) community. In part, this is justified due to the relatively low probability of such an effect. On the other hand, there is a common belief that the inability to isolate faults due to this effect is the evident drawback of model-based diagnostics. This paper shows how, and under which conditions, the fault compensation effect can be identified. In this connection, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the fault compensation effect are formulated and exemplified by diagnosing a single buffer tank system in open and closed-loop arrangements. In this regard, we also show the drawbacks of a bi-valued residual evaluation for fault isolation. In contrast, we outline the advantages of a three-valued residual evaluation. This paper also brings a series of conclusions allowing for a better understanding of the fault compensation effect. In addition, we show the difference between fault compensation and fault-masking effects.</p>