Ever wonder which states allow incompetent doctors to get away with the most bad stuff? So do our friends at Public Citizen’s Health Research Group - which is why it publishes an annual ranking of state medical boards that shows exactly which states are living up to their obligations to protect patients, and which are not. Unfortunately, most states are not.
This year’s report found that two huge states - California and Florida - are among the ten worst states with respect to disciplining bad doctors, while Minnesota was the absolute worst.
From the news release: “The overall national downward trend of serious disciplinary actions against physicians is troubling because it indicates many states are not living up to their obligations to protect patients from bad doctors," said Sidney Wolfe, M.D., Public Citizen’s acting president and director of its Health Research Group. "State lawmakers must give serious attention to finding out why their states are failing to discipline doctors and then they need to take action - either legislatively or by applying pressure on medical boards. Otherwise, they will continue to allow doctors to endanger the lives and health of their residents because of inadequate discipline.”
Check out the report to see where your state ranks.
No surprise as far as the State of Maryland is concerned. I provided the Maryland Board of Physicians and its sister agency the Office of Health Care Quality with compelling evidence that my father was abandoned and allowed to die at a Maryland hospital, yet neither agency has seen fit to even question the doctors involved, much less hold them or the hospital accountable. OHCQ, the more communicative of the agencies, went as far as to tell me that the legislature does not want them regulating hospitals too aggressively.
Posted by: Al Neustadter | June 11, 2009 at 05:42 PM