inTroducing concerns, we can deal with upwards of 3,000 matters per year. For most of us with medical practices, this is an after-hours job, one involving hundreds of hours per year on nights and weekends of reading cases to prepare for panel meetings.
Q & A to the profession. And perhaps most significantly, ICRC has become more sensitive to complaints around potential sexual abuse, reflecting public expectations and the profession’ s repugnance of such behaviour.
What might a practising physician want to know about the ICRC’ s approach to cases? A. Complaints are viewed as objectively as possible and if the care is good, we are very happy to say so. We recognize that good doctors are mortified when their care is seen as deficient in any way. In a majority of cases, no action is required as the care delivered has been found to be good. Otherwise, the ICRC has a range of tools available, many of them educational. Referral to discipline is used only when appropriate, for example with serious conduct issues, or when education has not sufficed, or when doctors are not willing to engage in education.
What is a common motivating factor in a patient’ s wish to make a complaint about a physician? A. Communication issues are at the root of the majority of complaints. Physicians may not realize how their words are being interpreted. Add an unexpected outcome or an unmet expectation and a complaint may result.
Has there been a change in how the Committee has responded to complaints over the years? A. We have become more consistent in our decision-making and have developed a riskbased approach to the assessment of cases. We have decreased the number of types of dispositions to increase the clarity of direction
Over the last two years, the ICRC’ s decisions have become much more transparent. Why was this so important? A. Bringing transparency into the process was a transformative initiative for the ICRC and the College. Historically, the ICRC has kept its decisions confidential in order to maintain physicians’ privacy. But times are changing, and there are new expectations. Working in an organization with a public interest mandate, we had to be at the forefront of increasing the information available to the public.
As chair of the ICRC, you were key to the operationalization of the transparency initiative. How would you describe that experience? A. This was a team effort. From the beginning of this initiative, I was deeply impressed by the ability of staff and committee members to understand the need for transparency in carrying out the work we do. One of the principles of the transparency initiative is that the greater the potential risk to the public, the more important transparency becomes. So our decision to post the summary of a particular case, with our determinations, is based on an assessment of the risk posed. The test in such situations is always – is this information that a patient should know? Is this information that I would want to know if I were a patient? By the same token, we were mindful from the outset that not all information needed to be
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Dialogue Issue 4, 2016