Patient Care Dilemmas
There are two general dilemmas that arise everyday in the natural course of medical practice:
Even the best doctors sometimes make mistakes.
Not all questionable patient care is negligence or medical malpractice.
Individual Responsibility Peer Review (IRPR) system of medical peer review deals with each of those dilemmas in a most direct manner.
Review the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) during the early years of the Modern Medicine Era (1950s) and read how it said all of the right things such as, “Doctors are the best judges of other doctors.”
Doctors are irrefutably the most qualified individuals for judging the questionable patient care of other doctors. Unfortunately, doctors do not know how to judge other doctors. Non-medical experts and special medical malpractice courts can never provide the same degree of medical expertise as that of fellow hospital medical staff practitioners. Additionally, every review of questionable patient care should occur as rapidly as possible and as close to the site of that care, with that hospital’s medical staff.
Medical peer review is a professional response which is presumed to take place, but rarely does take place.
Hospital medical staff peer review of questionable patient care is the only method which is capable of fulfilling every identifiable element necessary for a true profession to satisfy its ethical obligation to the society they have sworn to serve.
Likewise, each doctor’s documented patient care track record is the only means to tell the difference between the good doctor who has made a typically human error and the marginally qualified practitioner who habitually teeters on potential medical disasters.
The IRPR system of medical peer review would be the best friend of every good doctor. It would be the marginally-qualified doctor’s worst nightmare.
An IRPR system of medical peer review can only be created and sustained by a community of doctors seeking to reestablish the true professionalism of their profession. Is there such a community of doctors present in America in this hour of great need?
People at every level of society continue to lament the need for healthcare change as basic elements, such as the above, go unconsidered. Doctors are the best judges of other doctors but doctors don’t know how to judge other doctors. Two simple, irrefutable facts completely ignored by all the “experts” seeking healthcare change.