Answering the “Call to Service”: Encouraging Volunteerism by Protecting Doctors as We Protect Ourselves

In this Note, Jacy Selcoe considers how the lack of liability protection for volunteer medical providers impedes volunteering, and how healthcare providers might imitate volunteer protections use in the legal industry to increase volunteerism. First, she dissects the current volunteer healthcare liability regime, then looks at how the legal community protects its volunteers through a uniform professional standard of malpractice insurance. Finally, she argues that streamlining volunteer healthcare liability to imitate the simplified, insurance-based model used to provide protection for volunteer legal services will allow governments the flexibility to incentivize volunteerism among healthcare providers, while giving practitioners and organizations the predictability and protection necessary to meet the public’s need.