As a healthcare professional working on the front line, you’ve taken an oath to help protect and serve the community around you. Your singular motivation has always been to help people in need, and you do this by practicing medicine, nursing, or through a pharmaceutical job. However, sometimes you can feel rather embattled – as if the world’s against you, and the people you aim to serve are after your money and motivated to destroy your career. If you sometimes feel this way, this article will outline how you should respond to this feeling.
Keep Notes
Of course, as part of your job you’re forced to take notes on how you treat different patients. But, in order to cover your own back when something goes wrong – or is claimed to have gone wrong – in your healthcare institution, it’s well worth keeping extra notes. Being aware of all of the events unfolding around you, and making notes of the decisions that you make, can help you to respond if there’s a claim made against you in the future.
Furthermore, it’s important that you and only you have access and sign-off rights to your medical notes. If someone else changes your notes and they’re signed off and stored, they might be incorrectly and unjustly used against you in the future. Be careful of this eventuality.
Responding to Fraud Accusations
The trend of accusations against medical professionals – of fraud in relation to Medicare and other governmental initiatives – has been a damaging one for dedicated and committed professionals across the country. The state of affairs has been that medical professionals are often wrongly accused of fraud – and don’t know which path of recourse to take.
If this sounds familiar to you – or if you yourself have been accused of fraud – you should read this blog content from Healthcare Fraud Group. Within it, you’ll learn how you should respond to such accusations – both from a legal standpoint, and in terms of your career. Remember that sound and are legal advice is always available if you’re in need of support in the future.
Mistakes and Errors
As most medical professionals are aware, mistakes are often made on wards and in healthcare institutions. Some are made through a catalog of errors, and some are the fault of specific policies that ended up not serving the patients. In all cases of negligence and mistakes, you need to be extra careful about your conduct.
Why? Well, because there are often witch hunts created in order to find a singular perpetrator for the ills that have been happening in your healthcare institution. In such cases, individuals are often wrongly blamed for decisions made on a collective or institutional level. Avoid being that person – a scapegoat for larger issues in your organization – by being aware of how decisions made around you might reflect on you throughout your career. And be willing to intervene if you see others making mistakes around you, too.
Protect your career in healthcare with the tips outlined above: designed to help you respond to mistakes, threats, and accusations.
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