22nd
America’s physicians, sworn to protect their patients from harm, increasingly face a surprising obstacle — their own hospitals.
In medical centers as small as Centre Community Hospital in State College and as prestigious as Yale and Cornell, doctors who step forward to warn of unsafe conditions or a colleague’s poor work say they have been targeted by hospital administrators or boards.
Instead of receiving praise or even support for trying to improve care, they’re disciplined or dismissed for being “disruptive” or for violating patient confidentiality. Frequently, the hospital turns the tables on the whistleblowers and accuses them of poor care. They also threaten internal investigations that could result in listing the complaining doctors in the National Practitioner Data Bank, which can make finding a similar position at another hospital all but impossible.