The recent news about the two Northwest Airlines pilots whose licenses were revoked, less than a week after they let their plane wander 150 miles off course, raises the question: Where are the firing offenses in medicine?
The pilots injured no passengers, and the event didn’t even qualify as a “near miss.” But because they egregiously violated safety rules by working on their flight schedules on a laptop in the cockpit, the aviation authorities did not hesitate to pull their licenses.
In the medical industry, by contrast, it is well known that a doctor will lose his or her license for only flagrant patterns of drug or alcohol abuse or other criminal behavior, with a trail of dead and injured patients usually lasting years before the practitioner is finally put out of business.
Read my entire post on this in the Huffington Post here.
One of the HuffPost comments on my blog post raised the fair point about what should be firing offenses for attorneys. Here’s what I said in response:
A firing offense for an attorney should be any conduct that is unethical or negligent and hurts a client. (That’s a short and probably incomplete answer to a complicated question.)
In most states, the highest court of appeals of the state has power to revoke attorney licenses. Some do a better job than others. But unlike medicine, everything happens out in the open, for the public to observe.
For patient advocates like me, the frustrating part of the medical discipline system is its secrecy and unresponsiveness. I filed a formal licensing complaint about a Maryland plastic surgeon who put a healthy patient into a permanent coma with a gross overdose of local anesthetic; two years later, I received a one-paragraph response from the state board that he had received a “private reprimand.” No details available, because, after all, it’s “private.”
In another recent case, I complained to the Florida nursing board about a nurse-midwife whose overuse of the uterine-stimulating drug oxytocin caused the uterus to rupture and the baby to suffer terrible cerebral palsy. More than a year later, I received a one-sentence reply that the board had “failed to find probable cause.”
In the law world, comparable incidents would have received at least a detailed explanation of why the licensing body was or was not taking action. That’s what we should demand of any professional disciplinary system that respects the public’s right to know.
The current sorry state of medical discipline is one reason I warn readers of my book, “The Life You Save: Nine Steps to Finding the Best Medical Care — and Avoiding the Worst,” that patients need to go way beyond looking up medical licensing discipline to make sure they are picking the right doctor for themselves.