Risk Management: Self Restraint in Speaking and Writing
February 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under New and Noteworthy
On February 10, 2010 the NY Times editorial page described a situation in which a Texas nurse was facing serious criminal charges for reporting a physicians’s misbehavior in an unsigned letter to the board of medical examiners. She used a patient’s name and other specific patient information to substantiate her claims. The doctor was sanctioned by the medical board but he tracked down the nurse who made the anynomous complaint. Her computer was confiscated by prosecutors for evidence that the nurse wrote the offending letter. Texas is one of a few States that does not protect professionals who lodge complaints against other professiions.
This very unfortunate situation can be viewed in two ways. How many providers, upon receiving a board complaint against them, have wanted to force the complainitants to put some of their skin in the process? “What can we do to stop them…?” is an oft heard refrain. It looks like practicing in Texas would be a way to start this course of vengence! Of The other view is this. Professionals are already very averse to dropping the dime on colleagues. This is true in states such as New Jersey where professionals have a duty to report professional misbehavior and have immunity from suit for doing so in good faith. The last thing we need is another deterence to self policing of mental health professions.
There is an underlying issue here that has to do with speaking and writing too much. Most licensed health professionals are required to note in writng what they have done with pateints. State and federal law stipulate the conditions under which clinical notes may be released. Health care professionals are not required to write letters, call judges or attorneys, and so on. When health professionals engage in writng and telephoning of this nature, more often than not they say or write too much. In may be that the Texas nurse included too much in her letter to the board. She may have violated patient confidentiality and did so unnecessaaarily for the sake of her complaint.
Happily, the case was summarily thrown out of court.
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