The Joint Commission is the latest healthcare heavy-hitter to call for better protection of healthcare workers, recently announcing the creation of Sentinel Event Alert 59, which addresses violence—physical and verbal—against healthcare workers. About 75% of workplace assaults occur in the...
When people think about sexual harassment in medical settings, what often comes to mind is the stereotype of a male supervisor being inappropriate with a female staff member. One might also think of a male attending physician convincing a female resident to exchange sex for career advancement,...
Bylaws should be carefully written to ensure that they can’t be changed casually, but also that amendments don’t face an unreasonable hurdle. This balancing act will be decided differently by various medical staffs.
However the medical staff authorizes amendments to its bylaws, changes...
One of the key challenges in any evaluation of human performance is the issue of bias, and peer review is no different. If a critical goal of peer review is fairness, then we must avoid any actions—intended or unintended—that would bias the results.
We began this series talking about “tribes.” As physicians, we belong to a very exclusive and circumscribed club of clinicians who inherently distrust anyone not a member of that tribe. In the hospital setting, this often plays out as “us” (the medical staff) versus “them” (the hospital...