How do you prevent medical malpractice?

By following Best Practices within the industry, creating and following (and updating) your own Policies and Procedures, documenting everything, and running occassional internal and external audits. Your P&P should include a strong set Quality Assurance controls. Overt, accidental malpractice, being accidental, is very hard to avoid -- as it's an accident. An example that comes to mind was a nurse, recently arrived in the USA and with limited language skills in reading American English, who almost adminsitered 100 times the Heparin dose the doctor prescribed -- in her country, ampules contained a different concentration. While this is easily armchair-quaterbacked, everyone had followed policy (and equal opportunity law) in this case. So the mistake, had it occurred, would have been, if not understandable, explainable (note that existing policies are what caught the mistake too). What would have helped in a malpractice hearing is demonstrating that strict procedures have been devised, are followed, and adherence is continually monitored and evaluated. Courts and peer reviews tend to treat a simple accident far less critically than chronic negligence.