Records Of Health Worker Misdeeds Kept Secret

[Becky72]

NPR
September 3, 2009

Twenty-two years ago, the federal government started keeping a list of nurses, nurse aides, pharmacists and pharmacy aides who've been disciplined by state licensing boards. It's called the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank.

But hospitals and nursing homes aren't allowed to see the database.

By law, it was supposed to be open to hospitals and nursing homes when they hire staff and want to run a background check. But the Department of Health and Human Services never completed the regulation implementing the law. Turns out, slow-moving bureaucracy is the main culprit.

"There's really no reason for it at all," says Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who runs the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen's Health Research Group.

Read it all: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112490243

[ejpoeta]

1. why would potential employers need to know any of that information!!

why the hell would they go to all the trouble to keep a friggin list only to keep it to themselves??

[CoffeeCat]

2. The neocons probably wanted to compile a list of...

...unscrupulous health-care providers that they could blackmail into
engaging in nefarious practices.

Yeah, it's tinfoily--but it's not entirely impossible.

After what Siebel E. disclosed during her testimony--it sounds like blackmail, extortion
and tit-for-tat is how things routinely get done in DC.

[Warpy]

3. The Board of Nursing here in NM publishes a newsletter

several times a year with lists of nurses who have lost their licenses, been disciplined by suspension or revocation of licenses, and put into substance abuse treatment programs.

The lists do run a month or two behind, but that's likely to do with printing considerations.

[DCKit]

4. Twenty two years = "slow moving". In geologic terms, not so much. n/t

[D-Lee]

5. Bush changed the administrative procedures to allow posting of rejected vengeful complaints

No surprise -- catering to institutions, ignoring procedural violations and the refusal of a hearing on the complaint.

Not all of these complaints are on the up and up.