Health Law and Policy

Order Description
Your medical staff is concerned about the continuing viability of its “shadowing” program to monitor new staff members (and those requesting new privileges) to confirm their competence to maintain the privileges they have been conditionally granted. These are not doctors in training but rather fully licensed doctors who want to practice anew at the hospital or want to practice a new area of practice at the hospital with new privileges). (The National Practitioner Databank Guidebook indicates that if a hospital medical staff assigns a monitor to all physicians or dentists initially granted clinical privileges rather than when a doctor with privileges receives a monitor as a result of questionable care, there is no need to report such action to the NPDB and AMA policy encourages such programs.) Specifically, the doctors who are asked to observe and report back their observations feel they are “damned if they do and damned if they don’t” when it comes to situations where they feel the need to intercede and take over the procedure when the supervised doctor is proceeding in a manner the monitor would not.
An observer-surgeon approaches you about his concern.

Part 1. Describe the theories of liability he might worry about and why observer physicians would not likely be liable for not intervening with patients of the observeddoctor.

Part 2. Is the risk of liability for the observer different if he does intervene?

Part 3. Is there any potential liability for the hospital in either case (non-intervention vs. intervention)?

Part 4 .What could the monitors do to reduce the risk of liability in return for their agreement to monitor care? What could the hospital do to reduce its risk of liability?

The essay should be no more than four pages double-spaced (Times New Roman 12). Please identify each part as “Part 1”, etc. when you answer the question, no referencing needed