The Star Tribune has published a troubling two-part series of articles on how the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice is less likely than most other state medical boards to take strong disciplinary action against doctors who have committed medical mistakes or misconduct.
The series also point outs that Minnesotans are less able than residents in many other states to access disciplinary and malpractice information about the state’s 20,000 doctors.
Write Strib reporters Glenn Howatt and Richard Meryhew:
In the past year, the Minnesota board received 728 complaints against doctors. After reviewing those cases, the board initiated 32 actions, ranging from suspending a license to ordering a doctor to get more training.
That rate of discipline has consistently ranked Minnesota near the bottom in a closely watched report of state medical boards published annually by Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, a consumer watchdog organization.
In 2010, Minnesota’s medical board finished last — 51st — among all states and the District of Columbia, with a discipline rate of 1.29 serious actions per 1,000 physicians. A serious action is considered a license revocation or restrictions on how a doctor practices.
Minnesota’s board is “consistently one of the worst in the country” at disciplining doctors, according to Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.
The board’s executive director, Robert Leach, doesn’t agree. He told Howatt and Meryhew that he is “satisfied the public is protected in Minnesota — very satisfied.”
“Remember,” Leach added, “that part of public protection is ensuring an adequate supply of health care practitioners to the public. You can’t take everybody out of practice just because they had a problem. That’s why we’re not in the business of removing credentials unless absolutely necessary. We want to be remedial.”
Leach told the Strib that Public Citizen’s report fails to take into account Minnesota’s non-punitive, corrective-action approach to disciplining doctors.
“We don’t discipline for a single issue usually,” Leach said. “Docs make mistakes and when they do sometimes people get hurt. But we have to look and see if this is a pattern of practice. Is this an aberration?”
Apparently, the board often doesn’t act even when a doctor’s employer or another state board has imposed discipline.
“In dozens of cases,” report Howatt and Meryhew, “the board took no action when doctors lost privileges at hospitals or clinics in Minnesota. In 2005, for example, a doctor voluntarily surrendered his hospital privileges after his employer put restrictions on his practice. The doctor later settled a malpractice case for nearly $1 million over a 2007 incident at another hospital involving a patient who was left a quadriplegic with brain damage requiring lifelong care. Neither incident sparked board action.”
You can decide how satisfied you are with the board’s corrective-action approach to disciplining doctors by reading the Strib’s series, which appears in the paper’s Sunday and Monday editions. It includes several stories (with some disturbing photos) of Minnesotans who took doctors to court for medical malpractice. It also includes a searchable list of disciplined Minnesota doctors.
