Study: Many MDs don’t blow whistle on addicted, incompetent colleagues

Chicago Tribune/AP, July 14, 2010

Your doctor could be drunk, addicted to drugs or outright incompetent, but other physicians may not blow the whistle. A new survey finds that many American physicians fail to report troubled colleagues to authorities, believing that someone else will take care of it, that nothing will happen if they act or that they could be targeted for retribution. A surprising 17% of the doctors surveyed had direct, personal knowledge of an impaired or incompetent physician in their workplaces, said the study's lead author, Catherine DesRoches of Harvard Medical School.