State Med Boards Not Punishing Dangerous Docs

This Fierce Healthcare report will be one year old tomorrow. Do you think the problem will be cleaned up by tomorrow? And remember, these Docs are NOT a Psychiatrically paperworked and kicked OUT of business onto SSI/SSDI Danger to Themselves or Others.

Psychiatrically Diagnosable Docs are Actually Killing people. Ain't no ifs, ands, or buts about it. State Diversion Programs either ignore them or hose them off and send them back out into the trenches.

Fierce Healthcare has;

State Med Boards Not Punishing Dangerous Docs

March 16, 2011 — 11:01am ET | By Alicia Caramenico

State medical boards have failed to discipline 55 percent of the nation's doctors who had their clinical privileges revoked or restricted by the hospitals where they worked, according to a report released Tuesday by Public Citizen.

Of the 5,887 physicians who the state medical boards failed to discipline, 1,119 of them were disciplined by hospitals because of incompetence, negligence or malpractice; 605 were disciplined for substandard care; and 220 were identified as an immediate threat to health or safety, according to the study which examined data from the National Practitioner Data Bank from 1990 to 2009.

"Either state medical boards are receiving this disturbing information from hospitals but not acting upon it, or much less likely, they are not receiving the information at all," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group and overseer of the study. "Something is broken and needs to be fixed."

In Washington, D.C., the District Board of Medicine failed to punish 60 percent of the doctors whose hospitals had reported them to the national data bank during the 20-year period, notes the Washington Post. New Jersey failed to discipline 57 percent of dangerous doctors, one of whom had eight hospital actions against his clinical privileges, notes NorthJersey.com.

The lack of disciplinary action against physicians with serious medical practice problems hinders public safety. Therefore, Public Citizen is urging Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to have the agency's inspector general investigate state medical boards. Public Citizen also is notifying the 33 medical boards that have had the worst records in punishing these doctors.

For more:
- read the Washington Post article
- read the NorthJersey.com article
- here's the Public Citizen press release

Related Articles:
State medical boards are 'under-disciplining' doctors, watchdog group finds
Doctor found guilty in bomb attack on state medical board chairman
High number of New York doctors on medical board watch list

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• Reopened National Practitioner Data Bank restrictions 'protect' disciplined docs
• Diagnostic communication failures up malpractice payments 40%
• Medical board lacks resources to punish dangerous docs
• Study: Hospitals 'dropped the ball' on disciplining doctors
• Consumer group ranks SC last for doctor discipline
• State medical board fails to discipline, disclose bad docs
• State medical board under fire for backlog of complaints
• Patient compensation could reduce malpractice costs, defensive medicine
• State boards lax on abusive healthcare workers

Thank You Fierce Healthcare and Ms Caramenico.

Here's a State by State report from Public Citizen:

http://www.citizen.org/documents/1937exhibitB.pdf