A small group of so-called “frequent flyer” doctors account for half of all patient complaints, new Australian data shows.
It shows a small percent of doctors account for a large percent of complaints which indicates that patients are not running off to the lawyers or complaints commissions/boards at the drop of a hat. A new study shows that most patients and doctors are reasonable people and the ones who are complaining have legitimate complaints about the few bad apples. Doctors need to stop being so paranoid that patients are ‘out to get them’.
A SMALL group of so-called ‘frequent flyer’ doctors account for half of all patient complaints, new Australian data shows.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne analysed 18,000 complaints made to 7 state and territory health service commissions and found that 15% of the 11,000 doctors in the study accounted for 49% of the complaints, corresponding to only 3% of all practising doctors.
The number of prior complaints a doctor experienced strongly predicted their chance of future complaints, with the risk of recurrent complaints nearly double in those with two prior complaints, and 30 times higher in those with 10 or more prior complaints.
Professor Ron Paterson from the University of Auckland said the findings were an “albatross around the neck of the Australian medico-legal system”.
“No one with a passing familiarity with the world of patient complaints will be surprised by the fact there is a group of ‘frequent flyer doctors’ who attract a disproportionate share of complaints,” he wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.
The authors criticised medico-legal institutions for remaining on the sidelines as quality and safety movements had risen over the last 15 years.
“They remain essentially reactive enterprises, with workloads that focus on dealing with the fallout from care that has gone wrong,” they wrote.
Study leader and author Professor David Studdert said the world-first study could form the basis of new strategies for improving quality and safety in healthcare.
“Finding a way to predict, early on, which clinicians are going to experience lots of medico-legal problems in the future is a kind of holy grail in our field,” he said.
“These findings are exciting because they open the way for agencies like health complaints commissions and medical boards to play more of a prevention role, rather than just picking up the pieces after things go wrong.”
“It can’t happen soon enough” says a spokesperson from Medical Error Action Group.
11 April 2013