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What's Wrong With Blaming Doctors For Their Mistakes?

May 05, 2016

You constantly hear from doctors that they are overworked, over-managed and overwhelmed by bureaucracy and patient expectations. That government and hospital administrators interfere with their relationship with their patients. Is all of this whining legitimate or are doctors trying to deflect from their own failures? Well, some of the whining is legitimate but a lot is not. Doctors and other medical care providers still have ultimate responsibility for patient care and they alone are failing to provide the level of care they claim to aspire to.

Currently, the health care industry is plagued by failure:

These are all health care crises doctors play a primary role in perpetuating. And despite the direct link between their prescribing practices and conduct, they refuse to accept most of the blame. If a patient dies because a doctor forgot to include critical information on the chart, it's an issue of too much paperwork and too little time to complete it. If a patient becomes addicted to painkillers prescribed by their doctor or bacterial infections become harder to treat, it's because the patient insisted on getting the prescription.

It couldn’t possibly be because doctors prescribe painkillers and antibiotics as a matter of course... Even my vet gave us antibiotics for our dog even though she said she had no idea what was wrong with her. It's just what doctors do despite all of the research and the warnings on overprescribing.

We Need Health Care Regulators and Policymakers To Put Patients First

It's frustrating to witness doctors harming people and blaming it on bullies, be they government or their own patients. But it is even more frustrating to witness the indifferent response by government policymakers and regulators, the health care industry and the general republic. However, the average citizen cannot take on the medical establishment without government intervention (although many of them would side with their doctor over government on this or any issue). Still, you would think that after learning that medical error is the third leading cause of death in this country…

  • Congress would hold a hearing to determine a cause and propose policy solutions
  • The White House would call for an emergency health care summit and propose policies to address these issues
  • The candidates for President of the United States would say, forget affordable health care, we need care that does not indiscriminately kill
But we're not getting any of that. To be fair, the White House is working on initiatives to curb opioid addiction and has an action plan for combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Also, just the other day, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel endorsed mandatory training for doctors prescribing opioids. But why don't any of these Administration efforts include a plan to create a database, paid by the health care industry, to track deaths caused by medical error?

Instead of blaming doctors and telling them to stop their bad practices or else, there are proposals for programs to teach doctors to gently say "no" to their drug seeking but not needing patients. Or mild peer pressure programs that promise a modicum amount of shame to force doctors to more carefully fill out their charts or nurses to read them so that patients go home with all the right limbs.

THIS IS INSANE!

We don't expect our doctors to be perfect and we accept that medical mistakes will happen, even deadly ones. But mollycoddling doctors when they fail for fear they will throw a tantrum and walk away from the profession is not a solution to the huge problems we face in health care. How about we have a public service announcement once a day listing all the people that were killed due to medical error, by whom and where...? Maybe that is a bit much, but I'm okay with putting this information in newspapers, online and on insurance and hospital websites.

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