Hospitals reluctant to discipline some practitioners

The vast majority of physicians aren't troublemakers, but bad behavior clearly isn't an isolated problem. There have been cases of physicians throwing objects in the operating room, yelling and hitting patients, and sexual abuse, the Association of Health Care Journalists reported recently—yet hospitals didn't investigate the claims in most of these instances, according to Syracuse.com.

Hospitals often don't do anything about the problem because the accused physician brings in a lot of money, Michael A. Carome, MD, director of health research at Public Citizen, in Washington, D.C. told Syracuse.com. When hospitals do report cases to state medical boards, physicians rarely receive more than a slap on the wrist for the misconduct, he said. Indeed, state boards disciplined only 4,479 of the 878,194 active, licensed physicians in the U.S. in 2012—less than 1%, Medscape reported.

Source: Fierce Healthcare