CAROLE MASO v. BRIAN ZEH

A woman sued a physician after her husband died following a medical procedure that a physician assistant helped perform, arguing the doctor should be held responsible for the assistant's alleged negligence. The Court of Appeals of Georgia ruled that the Physician Assistant Act, the state law letting doctors delegate medical tasks to physician assistants, does not by itself make a supervising physician automatically liable for the assistant's mistakes. The widow asked the Supreme Court of Georgia to take up the case and reconsider that ruling. The Supreme Court denied the petition for certiorari, meaning it chose not to review the case further, leaving the Court of Appeals' decision in place. In a concurring opinion, one justice explained that while there may be a strong argument that a supervising physician and a physician assistant act like a principal and agent under ordinary Georgia liability law, that particular argument was never properly presented or preserved in this lawsuit, so the court could not fully address it here.

The Supreme Court of Georgia denied review, leaving intact the Court of Appeals' ruling that the Physician Assistant Act itself does not create vicarious liability for supervising physicians for their physician assistants' medical acts; a broader agency-based theory of liability was not properly before the court.

Physicians who supervise physician assistants, a common arrangement across Georgia given the state's shortage of doctors, are not automatically liable for their assistants' mistakes just because a supervising relationship exists under the Physician Assistant Act, at least under the theory tested in this case.

Petition for certiorari denied

1. The court's order simply denied the petition for certiorari, meaning it chose not to take up the case, so the Court of Appeals' ruling that the Physician Assistant Act does not itself impose vicarious liability on supervising physicians remains the law.
2. In a separate concurrence, Justice Pinson explained that under long-standing Georgia principal-agent law (O.C.G.A. § 51-2-1), a person can be liable for the acts of someone acting on their behalf if the two are in a principal-agent relationship, and the relationship the Physician Assistant Act creates between a supervising doctor and a physician assistant resembles that kind of relationship.
3. The concurrence noted that this broader agency argument was never properly raised: the plaintiff had pursued a separate 'actual agency' theory in the trial court, lost, and did not appeal that loss, so only the narrower question of whether the statute itself creates liability was before the court.
4. Because the agency-based theory was not preserved for appeal, the court could not use this case to resolve whether a physician and a physician assistant are typically in a principal-agent relationship that would trigger ordinary vicarious liability rules.
5. The concurrence flagged the underlying vicarious liability question as important given how common physician assistants and nurse practitioners are in Georgia's health care system, and signaled openness to revisiting it in a future case where it is properly presented.

• medical malpractice
• physician assistants
• vicarious liability
• certiorari denial
• Physician Assistant Act