A new Virginia law governing collaborations between nurse practitioners and doctors leaves unresolved key legal issues in team-based care, including those pertaining to medical malpractice and liability and anticompetitive practices.
Punishing women who use drugs during pregnancy deters them from seeking prenatal care and entering drug treatment programs, and the relevant policies may unfairly target poor or minority women.
A hospital shares responsibility for system failures that result in harm to a patient in its care. A fully functional computerized physician order-entry (CPOE) system should be able to prevent “copy and paste” medication errors from harming patients.
If society values physicians because they possess valuable clinical skills and exercise those skills with a fiduciary ethic of care toward their patients, we ought to evaluate physicians on those grounds directly, rather than looking to their behavior “after hours.”
James Mills Jr., MD, a founder of emergency medicine, believed he could have greater impact on medical care for the poor in his city by giving up his practice and working in the emergency room full time.