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Is it ethical to overlook a colleague’s incompetence?
By Lauren | July 22, 2010
Let’s take a break from Mel Gibson and the BP oil spill to talk about an issue that may well raise its ugly head in your life sometime soon. Last week, The Washington Post reported in its “The Checkup” blog that a survey conducted by Massuchusetts General Hospital had revealed troubling results. According to the Post, researchers asked 2,938 doctors practicing in a variety of specialties if they would report a fellow physician who was drunk, high on drugs, incompetent or otherwise impaired. The results were, shall we say, mixed.
64% of the doctors who participated in the survey acknowledged that they have a professional responsibility to report significantly impaired or incompetent colleagues, 69% percent said they were prepared to deal with impaired colleagues and 64% said they were prepared to deal with incompetent colleagues. That means about one-third of the responding doctors didn’t see any obligation to report their fellow physicians or weren’t prepared to deal with them. Ouch.
The survey results became more disturbing when the questions moved from the abstract to the concrete. It’s one thing to say you’re willing to report or deal with a hypothetical incompetent person, quite another matter to report someone you actually know. 17% of the survey respondents said they had direct personal knowledge of an incompetent or impaired doctor in their group, practice or hospital in the past three years, but only two-thirds of the respondents actually reported that knowledge to anyone. Their reasons for not reporting were predictable: fear of reprisal, hope that nothing bad would happen, concern that the incompetent doctor would be disproportionately punished, and the belief that someone else would solve the problem.
The study suggests that about 10% of doctors may be unfit to practice medicine, but are doing so anyway with the complicity of their more capable colleagues. That’s not a huge number from a statistical point of view, but it can be a matter of life or death to patients who stumble into their incompetent hands. The researchers who conducted the study called for better regulation and reporting systems that protect confidentiality. But confidentiality in a professional disciplinary system creates all kinds of ethical issues and, in my view, more regulation isn’t necessarily the answer.
Here’s an alternative. It’s never fun to report an incompetent colleague, but it’s an obligation imposed by almost every profession’s code of ethics. Many professionals hold their tongues when faced with a colleague’s incompetence out of fear that the colleague will be unfairly beaten up and a sense of “there but for the grace of God go I,” since no professional gets it 100% right every time. So, instead of pretending that doctors are supposed to be perfect and disproportionately punishing those who aren’t able to practice well through a confidential system that doesn’t allow them to confront their accusers, how about developing a reporting system that provides caring oversight to incapable doctors while protecting innocent patients? In this situation, the phrase “physician, heal thyself” seems particularly apropos.
To read The Washington Post blog, click here.
Topics: Business Ethics, Professional Ethics, business communications, ethics |
July 28th, 2010 at 7:01 am
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