(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-21 07:25

The release on Wednesday of a report on a new mechanism to assess the professional ethics of doctors captured the urgent need to address the irregularities and unhealthy tendencies that have tarnished the reputation of medical workers in recent years.

With disputes between patients and doctors on the rise and complaints about irresponsible drug prescriptions increasingly common, we have every reason to embrace the mechanism jointly initiated by the Ministry of Health and State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Then again, close consideration of the mechanism immediately gives way to questions about its effectiveness in preventing doctors from prescribing too many or completely unnecessary drugs in exchange for kickbacks from drug sellers.

The mechanism requires doctors and nurses to assess their own professional ethics first. Then their immediate superiors will assess them, and finally hospital authorities will conduct a final evaluation of their staffs. Such an assessment will be conducted once a year.

We cannot say for sure that the mechanism will completely fail to resolve the irregularities and unethical practices afflicting the healthcare industry. But it is equally true that a conflict of interest within a hospital would compromise the efficacy of the proposed assessment process to such a degree that it would finally become a formality without any substance.

Imagine a doctor or nurse giving him or herself a negative work assessment. How could a section head tarnish the reputation of his or her department by singling out the bad apples? Nor will hospital authorities be willing to reveal the skeletons in their closets.

The mechanism has apparently adopted a closed-door approach based on the assumption that all doctors and nurses will be willing to open their minds when judging themselves, and that leaders at various levels will be upright enough to reverse wrongdoings in an earnest manner.

Why not let patients get involved in the assessment of doctors and nurses? If we really want to change the professional ethics of medical workers for the better, we need a more scientific and open assessment mechanism.

(China Daily 12/21/2007 page10)