Why deal with potential impairments?

My first consulting assignment involved a surgeon on a small medical staff with chronic depression. He would experience meltdowns in the middle of the night when nurses attempted to rouse him from a fitful sleep. On two occasions he slammed down the phone after being asked to come into the hospital to do an intervention. One patient had early sepsis and needed surgical intervention and antibiotics; the other had a persistent arterial bleeder, anemia, and an acute myocardial infarction. Both patients died because he could not bring himself to come in and the requesting nurse did not feel comfortable going up her chain of command to seek alternative help.

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