A Follow up to Our Ethics Session

Hello everyone - I hope you all enjoyed the session with Paul Hoffman last week. It is amazing how broad a range of ethical issues there are to consider/manage as a healthcare professional - from any vantage point.

I saw this article come over the AP new wire today and it made me thing about Paul's point about inconvenient truths. Here is a link to the article and a small piece of the intro. What do you think is driving this behavior by physicians and what would it take to compell have a more ethically appealing approach?

Kim

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/usa_doctors_incompetence_dc

Nearly half of all U.S. doctors fail to report incompetent or unethical colleagues, even though they agree that such mistakes should be reported, researchers said on Monday.
They found that 46 percent of physicians surveyed admitted they knew of a serious medical error that had been made but did not tell authorities about it.
"There is a measurable disconnect between what physicians say they think is the right thing to do and what they actually do," said Eric Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the survey.
Doctors are also surprisingly willing to order unnecessary -- and often expensive -- tests such as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scans. Just 25 percent said they were looking out to ensure they did not unintentionally treat someone differently because of their sex or race, the survey found.