Unprofessional Practices in the Medicine Essay

Introduction

Doctors and medical practitioners usually involve themselves in unprofessional practices that affect the welfare of their customers and clients. Over the past few years, there have been serious cases of professional misconduct that have been heard by the general medical council and some of the doctors have appeared before courts to answer criminal charges of unprofessionalism and negligence.

The civil complaint process

The general public is ignorant about the wider issues surrounding the standards of medical practice and how to get legal redress in case of medical unprofessionalism. There are formal civil procedures that a customer or a client can follow while reporting cases of professional incompetence and conduct among the health professionals (Reeg & Bebout, 1993). The process of registering the complaints is formal and a complaint form obtained from the civil authorities is recommended. These complaint forms are available from the civil authorities, legal authorities and even the provincial administration. All the investigations departments also have these forms. In case a complaint is filed without a form, it can be filed if they are clearly handwritten or typed (Hayward, 2001).

However, the complaints cannot be submitted by email because the complaints must bear the signature of the complainant. There are several important things that must be contained in a good complaint about professional malpractice in the medical field. The complainant must provide the name of the doctor and the name of the institution where the malpractice took place. The complaint must also contain the day and the time of the malpractice and the description of the event that the customer or the patient is recording as malpractice (Phillips, 2004). If possible, it is important to include the names of the people who were there when the event took place because they will give enough evidence that will make the process of investigation very clear. The next process is an authorization. Before any investigation takes place, the complainant is required to sign a form called Authorization and Consent to Release Information which is available at the civil authorities’ premises. The consent is important because the information recorded by the complainant can easily go public and affect the complainant. This means that that authorization safeguards the investigating authorities from future backlash by the complainant should the released information affect the complainant adversely.

The role of the regulatory agencies

There are two main governmental bodies that regulate the health care field in the US. These are the federal health department and the judiciary, though each state has its own medical board that regulates the health care services at the state level. The former is charged with civil enforcement of the health regulations including the HIPAA while the latter is charged with the criminal prosecution of violators of the health regulations. Traditionally, complaints by customers and patients about the unprofessional malpractices by health and medical professionals used to be addressed by the justice system. The Justice system is used to arbitrate cases involving individuals and medical professionals and they used to safeguard patients and customers against medical malpractices (Jeffery, 2000). Many cases of medical malpractices have been handled by various courts in the United States of America successfully. The courts used to address both criminal and negligence cases using standards set by the legal systems in the United States of America. However, these standards were very subjective especially in the cases of negligence because they created a very thin line between criminal malpractice and negligence meaning that the medical practitioners who are involved in the breach of duty that causes negligence were punished by the law in almost the same ways as the practitioners who breached a duty in a criminal manner. That is why the standards of arbitration have changed and in the modern medical environment, the justice systems and legal authorities are not highly involved in arbitration of cases of negligence. They have left the medical field to regulate itself and set standards that every practitioner should adhere to. Failure to adhere to the standards set by the regulatory organs in the medical field such as the medical regulatory board automatically leads to penalties as stipulated by these agencies. These regulatory agencies include the medical services board and the medical practitioner’s board which safeguards the clients of the medical field from exploitation and mistreatments by doctors and healthcare providers (Tancredi & Giannini, 1994).

How do these agencies regulate the medical field? The authorities ensure that every healthcare provider, whether private or public adheres to the laid down regulations. The medical field has been infiltrated by rogues who are giving the medical practice a bad name and the main role of the regulatory authorities is to ensure that the customers are protected from these rogues. One of the crimes committed by medical practitioners is the wrong diagnosis of disease and wrong prescription of medicine. This is dangerous to the bodies and the general health of the patients and the regulations in the medical field stipulate that should a complaint be made about a case of misdiagnosis or wrong prescription of drugs, the medical practitioner is supposed to reimburse the money charged for the medical services. The wrong diagnosis of disease and prescription of drugs is an act of negligence that can be dealt with internally by the medical services boards (Giannini, 1994).

However, in a case where the wrong prescription of medicine and misdiagnosis of disease causes grievous bodily harm or death to the patients and the customers, this malpractice moves from negligence to crime. This means that the case can no longer be handled by the regulatory agencies within the field and this needs the intervention of the civil and the legal systems. Criminal malpractice within the health field can lead to hefty fines, jail sentences and cancelation of the operating licensee of the medical practitioner involved in the crime. The state of California has a medical board that maintains a register of all practitioners and their addresses. This register contains all the information about their licenses, criminal record, insurance procedures, the disciplinary actions taken against the practitioners, complaints made against the practitioners and all the relevant information about practitioners. This enables the board to properly regulate medical services in the state (New Haven Medical Center, 2007). Apart from protecting the public against some rogue practitioners, the board also protects the medical practitioners from fraudulent and wayward members of the public who may seek to make financial gains by making false claims against the practitioners. The board also protects all its licensees from the misuse of the information that they have submitted to the board because the misuse could threaten the reputation, rights and benefits of a licensee.

The Medical Board of California is one of the strictest in the |United States of America and it takes a lot of time before it can license a practitioner (Gair, 1999). The board gets a lot of information about the applicants from all the relevant bodies including medical schools to ensure that all its licensee is medically responsible and can be trusted with delivering medical services with utmost professionalism. This strictness has ensured that cases of medical malpractice and unprofessionalism in the state remain down because most of the licensed practitioners have passed the professionalism test. In the case of an instance of professionalism by a practitioner, the penalties that the board serves are very harsh and range from financial penalties to cancellation of licenses and suspension depending on the gravity of the malpractice.

Potential criminal liability

One of the potential criminal liabilities that a health care professional might face is the wrongful and criminal use of medical information. Health care providers that access protected health information risk being suspended or even criminal prosecution because the use of this wrongfully accessed information violates the HIPAA regulations. Access to protected information is a crime both in medicine and in legal circles and this crime cannot be tackled by the medical regulatory boards in the absence of legal structures. There is a case that recently concluded at the US attorney’s office in Arkansas that points at the gravity of this crime and the harsh penalties that the offenders face. In December 2008, a female nurse was sentenced to probation in Arkansas because of revealing protected health information thus violating the HIPAA regulations that forbid the disclosure of protected health information.

The woman in question is Andreas Smith and in December 2008, she was indicted by the Arkansas court because of violating HIPAA administrative simplification act and conspiring to use protected health information illegally with her husband who also appeared before the same court to answer criminal charges (National Academy of Sciences, 2009). Ms. Smith was a health care professional working in a health clinic located in the outskirts of the town called Jonesboro in Arkansas and in the course of her work, she accessed information of a patient in that clinic. She later shared that information with her husband who wanted to use the information giants the patient in a future lawsuit. This was the fifth criminal case involving a violation of the HIPAA since the privacy regulations became effective in 2003. The case against Smith is special because, before the implementation of the current regulations the management of the institution where the crime has occurred would be charged but the new regulations require the individuals involved in the medical malpractices to take responsibility for their actions. The government in this case charged the individual and not the clinic. According to HIPAA regulations, accessing protected health information is equal to identity theft.

References

1. New Haven Medical Center. (2007) “The Four Elements of Medical Malpractice”. Yale: Issues in Risk Management.
2. Reeg, B and Bebout, L. (1993). “What’s It All About, Daubert?”.
3. Gair, A. (1999). Preparing Plaintiff’s Expert in the Post Kuhmo Era, New York: State Bar Association,
4. Tancredi, L.R, Giannini, A.J ( 1994). “The admissibility of scientific evidence in psychiatric malpractice: junk science and the Daubert case”. Journal of clinical forensic medicine1.
5. Giannini, A.J. (1994), The medical-legal implications. Psychiatric Forum. 14(2):6-10, 1989.
6. Phillips, R.L, (2004). “Learning from malpractice claims about negligent, adverse events in primary care in the United States”. Qual Saf Health Care13 (2): 121–6.
7. Hayward, R.T. (2001). “Estimating hospital deaths due to medical errors: preventability is in the eye of the reviewer”. JAMA286 (4): 415–20. doi:10.1001/jama.286.4.415. PMID 11466119.
8. The National Academy of Science. (2009). ^ “Medication Errors Injure 1.5 Million People and Cost Billions of Dollars Annually”.
9. Jeffrey, B. (2000). Medical Malpractice Study, Disproving Frivolous Myth The National Law Journal86 (2): 41–50