Per incuriam: the decision on the overtime claim in Leung Ka Lau v Hospital Authority

In Leung Ka Lau v Hospital Authority the plaintiffs were doctors who claimed compensation for, inter alia, enforced overtime extracted without pay from them by their employer, the defendants. The Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal and the Court of Final Appeal dismissed their overtime claims on purely the terms of their contracts of employment. This paper argues that the decisions of all three courts on the overtime claims were made per incuriam because their attention was not drawn to the applicable statutory provisions which would have invalidated the contractual provisions on which the courts rested their decisions. The paper sketches the socio-economic and ethical basis of overtime work and pay before proceeding to analyse the common law (contractual) basis of the judgments, traces the history as well as undertakes construction of the statutory provisions which, if taken into account, would have seen the plaintiffs succeeding.

Is Asian per capita GDP panel stationary?

The goal of this paper is to examine whether per capita GDP for 15 Asian countries is panel stationary. We apply a panel test for stationarity that allows for multiple structural breaks developed by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (Econ J 8: 159–179, 2005). Our main findings are: (1) when we apply conventional tests, such as the ADF and KPSS univariate tests without structural breaks, we find little evidence for stationarity; (2) when we apply the KPSS univariate test with multiple structural breaks, we find evidence of stationarity for 10 out of 15 countries; and (3) when we apply the KPSS panel test with multiple structural breaks, we find overwhelming evidence of panel stationarity of per capita real GDP for different panels of Asian countries.

Are G7 per capita real GDP levels non-stationary, 1870–2001?

In this paper we examine whether or not G7 per capita income can be classified as a stationary process using data for over a century. The unit root null hypothesis is tested using the recently developed Lagrange multiplier test which allows for at most two structural breaks. We are able to reject the unit root null hypothesis for all the countries at the 5 percent level or better, except for Italy and Germany.

Clinical events reported by surgeons assessing their peers

BACKGROUND: All surgical deaths in Queensland, Australia are reviewed by external surgeon peers, and clinical events are recorded. The study objective was to classify clinical events in surgical patients who died.

METHODS: Deaths notified to the Queensland Audit of Surgical Mortality between 2007 and 2013 were assessed by surgeons' peers who decided whether a clinical event occurred. The most serious clinical event per patient was analyzed.

RESULTS: Peer surgeons reviewed 4,816 deaths. Most patients (70.7%) had no clinical event. Events were preventable in 58% of patients and less than 1 in 10 events was severe. The most frequent events were classified as patient assessment (34.5%), suboptimal therapy (15.3%), and delays (15.1%).

CONCLUSIONS: Peer review of all surgical deaths identifies preventable clinical events and provides opportunities to improve decision making, better therapy and reduce delay in implementing appropriate surgical care. Review feedback to surgeons and other stakeholders should improve patient safety and quality.