A patient is unhappy with her cosmetic surgery results and begins to bombard her physician with voice mails and e-mails demanding a refund; her doctor ponders a restraining order. A physician has proof that his patient is “doctor shopping” to procure extra pain pills to feed a drug addiction. A psychiatric patient threatens his doctor with physical violence. Each of these real Massachusetts cases, while radically different, had the common effect of prompting a doctor to do the unthinkable: fire a patient. But before those doctors prescribed pink slips, they call to their lawyers. A lack of standardized policies and an increasingly litigious culture have combined to make doctors wary of abandonment claims and medical malpractice lawsuits, according to local health care lawyers, who say that in recent years they have fielded more inquiries from doctors and health care organizations about the best way to terminate a doctor-patient relationship. Statistics on patient firings are difficult to track down, although anecdotally local practitioners say the numbers are trending upward. When a patient-physician relationship begins, the doctor is under ethical and legal obligations to provide medical services for as long as the patient wants, according to the American Medical Association. For a doctor to cut off that relationship and not be successfully sued with an abandonment claim, a laundry list of steps needs to be taken.
Please click on the link below to read the Boston Business Journal article:
http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2008/03/24/story2.html?b=1206331200%5E1608221
For more information on defending medical malpractice, nursing home and general liability matters in Florida contact Howard Citron at Citron & Associates, P.A. – www.citronlegal.com.
