Doctors Turn Blind Eye To Incompetent Colleagues
Georgia citizens face some of the most restrictive medical malpractice laws in the country. One of the justifications used by politicians and medical groups to support these restrictions on injured patients right of recovery is that medical professionals can police their own and eliminate incompetent practitioners.
This bogus contention has finally been exposed by a doctor survey published Tuesday in of all places, the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Conducted by a team from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the study used data from a 2009 national survey of close to 3,000 physicians practicing in anesthesiology, cardiology, family practice, general surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics and psychiatry.
Physicians were questioned in three areas: about their responsibility to report physicians who were incompetent or impaired by drugs or alcohol, about their preparedness and comfort level in doing so, and about their experiences with colleagues with these issues.
According to the report, about 70% of physicians said they feel prepared to report impaired physicians, and 64% said they were prepared to report incompetent ones. But more than one-third, 36%, said they do not feel obligated by professional commitment to do so.
Physicians with less experience, 10 years or fewer, were most willing to report impaired or incompetent colleagues. Those with greater experience, 20 years or more, were less likely to feel that it was their responsibility to do so.
Pediatricians and family practice doctors were the least likely to say they felt prepared to deal with impaired or incompetent colleagues; anesthesiologist and psychologists apparently felt most prepared.
The survey also found that 17% of respondents had direct knowledge of an impaired or incompetent physician colleague in their hospital, group or practice in the last three years. Of these physicians, 67% had reported that person to a hospital, clinic, professional society or other authority.
Among physicians who had encountered impaired or incompetent colleagues and had chosen not to report them, the two most frequently cited reasons for not doing so were the belief that someone else was taking care of the issue and the belief that nothing would happen as a result of the report.
It is frightening that a large portion of physicians do not honor the commitment to report another physician even when they have direct personal knowledge of a colleague that is incapacitated by drugs or alcohol or otherwise incompetent to be rendering care to innocent human beings.
