MEDICALMALPRACTICE THE WILES OF AMENDMENT 7 by Marcus J. Michles II The unpredictable legal landscape concerning Amendment 7’s applicability to adverse incident reports became even more so in November of 2022 when the First District Court of Appeal (DCA) issued a lengthy and challenging opinion in Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare, Inc. v. Wiles by and through Wiles. 1 There, the First DCA determined that a hospital incident report met the defi-nition of Patient Safety Work Product (PSWP) under the federal Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA). Since it found the document at issue to be PSWP, the First DCA then decided the related federal privilege preempted Florida’s consti-tutional provision that would otherwise create a right of access to the document. This would not have been a surprising result if the issues, analysis, and grounds were not nearly identical to those previously before the First DCA in the Charles 2 case. The First DCA was previously reversed when Charles made its way to the 38 | March/April 2023 | www.MyFJA.org Supreme Court in 2017, and yet the Wiles decision reaches the same conclusion through the same basic analysis it employed in Charles on, albeit slightly different, facts. This was especially bold considering the Wiles opinion, in deciding the issue of preemp-tion, suggested a core element of the Supreme Court’s analysis in Charles on the issue was, perhaps, merely dicta. Even as the Wiles case continues its journey through the court system and a Supreme Court fight, there are important details to absorb and practice tips that we can take from a close review of the case history and underlying evidentiary framework. During the course of litigation against Tallahassee Memorial in a hypoxic-ischemic birth injury case, the Plaintiff, Jade Wiles, sought production of a hospital Safety Event Report. Jade’s son,
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