One of the persistent problems in medicine is that of bad doctors who are kicked out of one hospital or medical group but allowed to go to another hospital or group with no warning to the new hospital or to the general public. These bad doctors are then allowed to harm patients at the new location until they screw up so badly there that they are found out again and the process repeats itself.
By definition, this is a problem we don’t hear about until one of the bad doctors screws up so badly and so often that it becomes public knowledge. Such a case occurred not too long ago at a VA hospital in Maine. While this was an egregious case, it would be a mistake to think that it was an isolated one or that these things only happen at the VA. It happens everywhere and for many reasons. Among them are that doctors don’t like to tell on each other, they don’t want to air their dirty linen in public, they are afraid that revealing the harm done by the bad doctor will get them sued either by the bad doctor or by the patients he or she has harmed or they just want the problem of the bad doctor to go away quietly.
In the Maine VA Hospital case, the physician in question was a podiatrist and he was apparently a very poor one. The VA found that he had botched surgery after surgery. In one case, he used the wrong hardware. In another, he severed a critical tendon. In another, he botched ankle fusion surgery so badly on two occasions on the same patient that she elected to have her lower leg amputated rather than live with the pain caused by the failed fusion attempts.
Despite concluding that this doctor was a “dangerous surgeon” as one supervising physician admitted in a later deposition, the VA did not report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank, where such reports are supposed to be made, and did not disclose his many mistakes to either patients or to state regulators who continued to renew this doctor’s license. As was the case with this podiatrist, the employer disciplines the bad doctor who sues and, as part of the settlement of the bad doctor’s suit, he or she is allowed to quietly resign and the employment record is wiped clean. On some occasions, the settlement even requires the employer to give a recommendation to the bad doctor to help him get a new job.
Usually, this is the place where I offer suggestions for how to avoid the problem I have been discussing. I can’t do that today. The public has to rely on the medical profession to clean its own house, root out bad doctors, and get them out of circulation. The profession acknowledges this is a problem and often mouths pious platitudes about assuring that only good doctors will be allowed to practice in the future. Of course, nothing changes. The bad doctors continue to harm patients. The bad doctors continue to be sued for harming patients and the medical profession continues to whine about frivolous malpractice suits. Physician, heal thyself!
