Corporate Responsibility of Clinics for Patient Losses in Indonesia -By Cintya Agustina Yuristasari

Today, the image of care, beauty and up to date science sold by clinics in Indonesia becomes visible only when patients are harmed; then the institutions running them shrink into legal mist hiding behind individual white coats and fragmented regulations. When it comes to profit, there is corporate responsibility. Regarding loss, it somehow dissipates.

Clinics are not small, naive side businesses. They are big business: high overhead, brand-focused and typically fancifully packaged as lifestyle escape mechanisms for health, look and “wellness.” They hire armies of physicians, nurses, lab personnel, marketers and back office staff. They come up with pricing strategies, set production quotas, control how many appointments can be taken and whether to invest more resources into safety systems or Instagram ads. But when patients are disfigured, infected, disabled or die even then the legal story still stubbornly stays on “the negligent physician” not the profit driven system that manufactured the conditions for harm to occur at all.

Clinics that have corporate rights, bear corporate responsibilities. That means talking about clinics in terms of legal liability not as the secondary thought; setting clear, direct obligations related to patient safety, informed consent, and risk management;  using vicarious and in applicable situations, strict liability where harm directly results from the institution proper (as opposed to a specific individual or staff member), even as which person was filling in on that particular day of service.

There is a clinic, which sets impossible targets, rewards volume over safety and tolerates terrible equipment which cannot wash its hands and accuse one doctor for standing alone in court. Corporate responsibility: It is time for the designer and beneficiary of the system to pay when that system injures.

Likewise, regulators play a role in this tendency to hide behind fuzzy language and technocratic fixes. Publishing more guidelines without a street fighting chance without automatic sanctions, license suspensions, compulsory compensation schemes, and public transparency is to turn a thicket of paperwork that clinics can navigate while patients keep wandering in the dark. A regime of regulation that appears good on paper but is almost never able to by virtue of the nature of corporate law pierce the corporate veil is not protection. It is theatre.

Indonesia likes to speak the language of the constitutional right to health and the welfare state. But that rhetoric flounders when a patient harmed in a clinic understands that justice means fighting a legally invisible corporate actor, an exhausted doctor and a slow, risk averse bureaucracy all at once. When the real cost of medical harm is quietly shared with families and workers at the front lines, but clinics always keep expanding their businesses in shopping malls and business districts, something is broken. Corporate responsibility is not an academic luxury. It is the bare minimum of a moral health system. If clinics can brand, scale and profit like corporations, they must also bleed like corporations when their systems fail: in courtrooms, in compensation funds, and in the hard metrics of revoked licenses and public accountability.

Until that occurs, “patient losses” in Indonesia will continue to be no more than what they are today; not a tragic consequence but rather the predictable result of a legal regime determined to protect capital over the corporeal integrity of human beings, one branch clinic at time.

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Member of Law Firm Victorious Indonesia