The New York Times Health blog posted an article about a recent Annals of Internal Medicine survey about doctors and professionalism http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/how-professional-is-your-doctor/.
Especially concerning is the number of physicians who are aware of and do not report medical errors. But there is a larger, systematic issue at play here. We cannot expect physicians to report medical errors when the system is stacked against them. There is a huge professional liability to reporting errors, whether your own or a colleague's. And while we can hope that a physician's ethical beliefs would cause him or her to rise above this, we cannot depend on it. I'm not saying that there are no situations in which the doctor should be held liable. But health systems have to work on a way that encourages doctors to report risks and errors without a constant fear of legal implications.
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