Background
Little
information exists on U.S. physicians who have been disciplined with licensure
or restriction-of-clinical-privileges actions or have had malpractice payments
because of sexual misconduct. Our objectives were to: (1) determine the number
of these physicians and compare their age groups’ distribution with that of the
general U.S. physician population; (2) compare the type of disciplinary actions
taken against these physicians with actions taken against physicians
disciplined for other offenses; (3) compare the characteristics and type of
injury among victims of these physicians with those of victims in reports for
physicians with other offenses in malpractice-payment reports; and (4)
determine the percentages of physicians with clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment
reports due to sexual misconduct who were not disciplined by medical boards.
Methods and Results
We
conducted a cross-sectional analysis of physician reports submitted to the
National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) from January 1, 2003, through September
30, 2013. A total of 1039 physicians had ≥ 1 sexual-misconduct–related reports.
The majority (75.6%) had only licensure reports, and 90.1% were 40 or older.
For victims in malpractice-payment reports, 87.4% were female, and “emotional
injury only” was the predominant type of injury. We found a higher percentage
of serious licensure actions and clinical-privileges revocations in
sexual-misconduct–related reports than in reports for other offenses (89.0% vs
68.1%, P = < .001, and 29.3% vs 18.8%, P = .002, respectively). Seventy percent of
the physicians with a clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment report due to
sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this problem.
Conclusions
A small number of physicians were reported to the NPDB
because of sexual misconduct. It is concerning that a majority of the
physicians with a clinical-privileges action or malpractice-payment report due
to sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this unethical
behavior.
Below: Physicians with Sexual-Misconduct–Related NPDB Reports, 2003–2013 (Physician-Level Analysis)
Full article at: http://goo.gl/EUIYLx
By:
Azza AbuDagga, Sidney M. Wolfe, Michael Carome
Health Research Group, Public Citizen, Washington, District
of Columbia, United States of America
Robert E. Oshel
National Practitioner Data Bank (Retired), Department of
Health and Human Services, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States of America
More at: https://twitter.com/hiv insight
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