HEALTH LAW & POLICY WORKSHOP
presents
William Lahey
DalhousieUniversity Law School
Inter-professional Practice and the Law: Understanding and Overcoming Barriers
Thursday, March 20, 2008
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Increased interprofessional collaboration within clinical teams is widely promoted as an enabler of multiple health system performance improvements. Related discussions of the regulation of health professions (and of law generally) are typically characterized by two interconnected assumptions: that it is a barrier to be overcome or eliminated and that this calls primarily for legislative change in the laws that govern the regulation of health professions. This perspective may understate both the extent and the nature of the relevance of professional regulation to the policy objective of wider adoption and maintenance of collaborative practice models. In doing so, it may inhibit the removal of the barriers while limiting the potential of regulatory law to function as an enabler of collaboration. An alternative approach that is more likely to create expanded regulatory space for collaborative practice while supporting its greater utilization would have at least two dimensions. It would pay greater attention to the role that regulatory practice plays in governing the application of the law. It would also pay greater attention to the relationships and interactions that occur between regulatory systems, within and beyond the regulation of the professions, usually above the law and institutional structures that define and belong to each system of regulation. In both respects, this alternative approach should draw guidance from the concepts (including responsive regulation, meta-regulation, enforced self-regulation and restorative justice) that feature prominently in the literature on regulation outside Canada and from the growing use of these concepts in the regulatory governance of safety and quality in health care systems in other countries.
William Lahey is a graduate of Mount Allison University (B.A., Geography), of Oxford University (B.A., Jurisprudence) and of the University of Toronto (LL.M.). At Oxford, he studied as Rhodes Scholar. He was clerk to Mr. Justice La Forest of Supreme Court of Canada, 1989-1990. After three years of private practice, be became a member of the N.S. Department of Justice, 1994-1996, working primarily as advisor to the N.S. Department of Labour. Subsequently, he served as Director of Corporate Services, N.S. Department of Human Resources (1996-98) and as Assistant Deputy Minister, N.S. Department of Health, 1998-2001. In 2001, he became Assistant Professor, Dalhousie Law School, 2001. He was awarded the Dalhousie Law Students' Society and Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award (for teaching in upper year courses) in 2003-04. Between 2004 and 2007, he was Deputy Minister, N.S. Department of Environment and Labour 2004-07, on leave from Dalhousie Law School. He is currently the Director of the Dalhousie Health Law Institute and Assistant Professor, Dalhousie Law School. He was recently awarded the Dalhousie Law School Hannah and Harold Barnet Award for Excellence in Teaching First Year Law. He is a member of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information please go to our web site at http://www.law.utoronto.ca/healthlaw/index.htm or contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
