Lawyers vs Doctors
Most legislators are attorneys. Almost all universities, hospitals, large companies, etc. have risk management business components populated largely with lawyers. Wills, trusts, pre-nuptial agreements, and other legal contracts impact countless aspects of every day life in America.
We as a society have come to assume that attorneys must put a legal stamp of approval on most basic managerial functions. Otherwise, the threat of litigation can dominate behavior to the point that organized entities feel prevented from doing what they are expected to do.
Example: Hospital medical staffs far too often fail to take remedial action against disruptive or marginally-qualified practitioners for fear of retaliatory litigation.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) created a voluntary peer review system for hospital Ob/Gyn departments. A journal article reported the findings of that peer review system in 2003 after the first 100 inspections. There were 3,003 Ob/Gyn hospital departments at that time.
A disheartening number of deficiencies were noted in that report, but one specific deficiency was that 38 of the 100 Ob/Gyn hospital departments had “substandard or disruptive physicians” as members. Many, if not most, hospital medical staffs have failed to reprimand or alter staff privilege of those less-qualified staff members purely due to that threat of being sued.
IF the medical profession can NOT create a system of medical peer review acceptable to every court in the nation – that is NOT the legal system’s fault!
Such lack of proper administrative control illustrates an absence of understanding of fundamental judicial demands. There is absolute need for a system of peer review done by a hospital medical staff which:
a. provides a uniform system of patient care review in all instances
b. subjects every medical staff member, regardless of status, to the exact same review process
NO court in America, up to and including the Supreme Court, would sanction retaliatory litigation against such an unbiased, standardized system of medical peer review.
There are those both within the medical profession and within the field of non-physician medical expertise who would argue that such a system of medical peer review can never be established.
I have formed a social response that proves useful in certain occasions:
First, one should politely walk away from those persons who can tell you what they are against, but can not tell you what they are for.
Second, one should run away from those persons who state they can recognize the impossible.
The impossible is yet to be clearly established.
Much of mankind has been bred with a flawed gene. Descendents of the “flat-earth society” have done their best to impede social advancement throughout the ages. Where would civilization be if the great thinkers had succumbed to the masses of small minds with limited vision?