The corrective action, summary suspension, and fair hearing processes are high-stakes proceedings and extremely stressful for all involved. Hospitals can alleviate some of this stress by ensuring their medical staff bylaws do not create extra pressure points when managing practitioner behavior...
One of the ways that we’ve gotten the other clinical departments to be involved is if they’ve had challenges with newly oriented providers. We started by speaking with the leadership from those departments, to first create a dialogue about what we were trying to accomplish with the orientation....
If an organization consistently relies on temporary privileges and does not fully verify practitioner credentials, it places patient safety at risk and exposes itself to a potential breach of duty.
There are several steps hospitals can take to prevent harassment. A big one is providing education and communication of what harassment is, what behaviors aren’t tolerated, how to report an allegation, and what the consequences for harassment are.
CMS, accrediting agencies, and state regulations enumerate myriad functions that medical staffs must address. These functions can be addressed in bylaws but may be better articulated in medical staff policies. The ultimate responsibility for all medical staff functions lies with the medical...
It has been two years since Christopher Duntsch, MD, was convicted of a felony count of injury to an elderly person and sentenced to life in prison. Duntsch, a former neurosurgeon practicing in the Dallas area between 2012 and 2013, allegedly killed or maimed as many as 35 patients in botched...