Beth Israel Deaconess fires plastic surgeon after 'impairment'

This is why people don't trust the media and your circulation's in a free-fall. You're trying to make up a conflict where there is none. Firing a physician for being impaired and intentionally putting patient safety at risk is completely different from taking no action when a well-intentioned physician makes a mistake - humans are fallible, after all, except maybe you, Cooney - because disciplinary action would create an environment hostile to surfacing and reporting medical errors, and thus, creating an opportunity to learn from them.

You need a license to practice medicine, but not to practice journalism. How interesting.

Why hasn't this story appeared in your newspaper????

Rachel makes some important distinctions between the two cases. Our purpose in publicizing the wrong-side surgery case to our entire staff (and then, necessarily, to an external audience) was to help bring attention to an important quality control issue to everyone in the hospital and, through my blog, to other hospital people around the world interested in lessons that could be drawn from that case. And, of course, we held the patient's name and specific medical information confidential.

We did not initially choose to make the Borud case public; rather we responded to a reporter's inquiry. The termination is a matter of public record. Nonetheless, Dr. Borud has certain rights of confidentiality with regard to details of the case, and we will not violate those rights. Ditto, of course, with regard to his patient.

I would like to know what the Dr. was impaired with, is he stealing drugs from his practice or writing out his own prescriptions

Rachel, it seems like quite an extrapolation to claim mistrust of the media and declining circulation from this rather neutral, small article that points out the contrasts between media coverage of a loaded subject like the hospital's handling of an intoxicated surgeon with the way it handled a less loaded, unfortunate quality control related measure such as the wrong-side misstep, which presents more of an opportunity for correcting future errors than does the impaired surgeon case.

Kudos to Paul for approaching this—albeit unfortunate—learning opportunity as such.

Hi Dr. Borud,

I tried to call your office many times without any success. Drop me a line or a note to let me know how you are doing!

I hope you are doing well!

I am a bit worried about you. So please keep your chin up and keep going through this tough time and you will do fine. You are the best. You are a strong man and stay resilient to a tough media.

You will get through this!

OPC (the smallest onion not)