Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Follow through is often the most glaring shortcoming with governmental solutions. For instance, Congress adopted legislation more than two decades ago intended to keep dangerous medical workers from getting jobs in other parts of the country. The plan was to create a database that would house records of nurses, pharmacists, psychologists and other licensed health professionals who had been disciplined so that hospitals could check the backgrounds of potential new employees. The effort so far has failed because of two reasons: 1) The federal government has taken 22 years to make the database available to hospitals; and 2) The database is missing thousands of important records.
An investigation by ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times found that the new database, which is supposed to become available on March 1, did not have entries that were posted on state-run disciplinary websites for medical personnel. Omissions included psychiatric technicians or occupational therapists in California who had been disciplined by the state, such as two individuals who failed to help a woman choking to death on a paper towel and another convicted of possessing child pornography.
Many states haven’t bothered to share information with the federal government, which has prompted Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to send a letter to the nation’s governors asking for their immediate help fixing gaps in the database. Sebelius has warned that her department will publicly list the names of agencies that don’t comply.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Dangerous Caregivers Missing From Federal Database (by Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, ProPublica)
Section 1921 of the Social Security Act (National Practitioner Data Bank
Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank)
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