If what Kevin Sacks reports today in The New York Times is accurate, this is an outrage.
It occurred to Anne Mitchell as she was writing the letter that she might lose her job, which is why she chose not to sign it. But it was beyond her conception that she would be indicted and threatened with 10 years in prison for doing what she knew a nurse must: inform state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.
[...]
When the medical board notified Dr. Arafiles of the anonymous complaint, he protested to his friend, the Winkler County sheriff, that he was being harassed. The sheriff, an admiring patient who credits the doctor with saving him after a heart attack, obtained a search warrant to seize the two nurses’ work computers and found the letter.
You can read the entire news story here. Nurses have an affirmative obligation to report concerns. When you have three nurses sending letters, the hospital has a problem and it’s extremely unlikely to be the case that one person is just out to “harm” a doctor’s reputation.
This case sets a horrible precedent, for even if Ms. Mitchell is fully acquitted, other whistleblowers may hesitate even more to report situations or concerns that should be reported.
Psychologist Ken Pope posted this to his mail list:
Melba Vasquez and I compiled the following list. We tried to come up with what we considered 7 of the most basic assumptions about ethics — about thinking through our ethical choices and deciding what to do.
We published the list in our first ethics book back in 1991 and have continued to present and discuss it in each edition up to the recent 3rd edition (*Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Practical Guide*).
Here are 7 fundamental assumptions about ethics:
1) Ethical awareness is a continuous, active process that involves constant questioning and personal responsibility.
Conflicts with managed care companies, the urgency of patients’ needs, the lack of adequate support, the possibility of formal complaints, mind-deadening routines, endless paperwork, worrying about making ends meet, exhaustion, and so much else can block our personal responsiveness and dull our sense of personal responsibility. They can overwhelm us, drain us, distract us, and lull us into ethical sleep. Our work requires constant alertness and mindful awareness of the ethical implications of what we choose to do and not do.
Maintaining ethical awareness includes acknowledging and taking into account our very human lack of perfection. All of us have weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and blind spots. The dramatic differences are not so much between those who have many human imperfections and those who have few but between those who are freely open–to themselves and to others– about how their own short-comings affect their work, and those who tend to see others as inferior versions of themselves.
Can we diagnose a political party with Oppositional Defiant Disorder? You may argue that the diagnosis is only used with children under 12, but given how the Republicans have been acting, it does seem appropriate.
If you were a “hippy,” a “liberal” or an activist student in Boston in the 60s as I was, there were two professors whose courses you would fight to get into: Timothy Leary and Howard Zinn — although your reasons for trying to get into their courses were often quite different. Whether you viewed Howard Zinn as a historian, an activist, or as inspiration to youth who needed ways to organize to effect change, his impact was immense.
Zinn died yesterday. You can watch a clip from Bill Moyers’ interview with him here:
In reporting his death, the Associated Press notes:
One of Professor Zinn’s last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.
“I’ve been searching hard for a highlight,” he wrote, adding that he wasn’t disappointed because he never expected a lot from President Obama.
“I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”
Once again, he had given voice to what I think. He will be missed.
That a 22-year old man survived in the rubble of a hotel in Port-au-Prince for 11 days seems like a miracle in its own right. The government had officially called off search and rescue operations, but his brother continued searching for him. The Guardian picks up the story:
Rescue workers were called back from the airport to help after Jean-Pierre’s brother, Jean Elie, heard tapping from the ruins of the Hotel Napoli Inn where he had been searching daily for him, after dreaming that he was alive. “Today is the first time we communicated with him,” Jean Elie said. “He asked for us to save him. God has been keeping him alive.”
Jean-Pierre turned to his brother by his bedside and told him: “When you are in a hole, I will try to reach out to you, too.”
I suspect that viewership of Conan O’Brien has never been higher than it’s been since NBC had a corporate dissociative experience in trying to boost its late-night line-up’s ratings. O’Brien is clearly not going quietly into the night:
This is my personal blog where I blog about privacy, issues in psychology that are of interest to me, and pretty much whatever's on my mind.
If you are looking for privacy news, you'll find it at the "mother ship," PogoWasRight.org. And if you're looking for more on medical or health privacy news and issues, check out my other site, PHIprivacy.net.
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