
Anesthesiologist trashes sedated patient - chmaynard
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/anesthesiologist-trashes-sedated-patient-jury-orders-her-to-pay-500000/2015/06/23/cae05c00-18f3-11e5-ab92-c75ae6ab94b5_story.html
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DanBC
Clincians are a bit different to customer service agents. A doctor can kill
you.

This court case is not about enforcing rules (we know that rules based
cultures leave plenty of room for abuse). It's about driving values. Have some
mechanism for blowing off steam, but when you're with a patient you give that
person the best care you can.

When clinicians let their empathy slip you get real, severe, abuse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Hospital_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Hospital_scandal)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winterbourne_View_hospital_abu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winterbourne_View_hospital_abuse)

[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20060502043818/htt...](http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20060502043818/http:/healthcarecommission.org.uk/_db/_documents/cornwall_investigation_report.pdf)

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rfrey
The article claims $200,000 in punitive damages... which means the claim was
$300,000 in actual damages? It's hard to imagine what damages the patient
suffered besides embarrassment.

It seems very pat. It sounds like everyone in the theatre was ripping into the
guy, which suggests a backstory in pre-op. And then the recorder was
accidentally left on.

I wasn't in the room, obviously, and there's probably much more information
that influenced the jury. But still, weird.

Edit: the recorder wasn't "accidentally" left on, the patient turned it on
_before_ the operation to capture _post-op_ instructions.

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russelluresti
This sounds like more of a case where the money awarded wasn't to compensate
the plaintiff for any physical harm, but to punish the doctors. Which, to me,
is just fine.

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plorkyeran
That's the $200k in punitive damages part. The other $300k is compensation for
harm.

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Xcelerate
I've done this before (after checking state law of course). I only made a
recording because of simple curiosity. When I listened to it afterward, I
discovered that nothing was said during the procedure other than that which
related to the work being performed. (What was hilarious though were my
attempts to speak after waking up.)

Sometimes it's not possible to do this in an elaborate surgery where you have
to remove all of your clothing.

I couldn't care less about the surgeon's personality (bedside manner) or what
he/she thinks about me personally as long as he performs his job well.

I think a much bigger problem in the medical field is the lack of performance
review. I remember reading one study that provided video recordings of gastric
bypass surgery to a panel of experts (professors, top-rated surgeons, etc.).
The experts did not know who performed the surgeries, but they gave each
surgery video a "quality" score. After a year, the outcome of each patient was
compared to the quality score, and strong correlations were noted.

Yet despite rankings of universities, professors, cars, computers, books, and
anything else one could possibly rank, you won't find rankings of how good
surgeons or anesthesiologists are at their job. Oh sure, you'll get some
subjective metric of how people _feel_ about the doctor (sites like
HealthGrades), but it's been shown this really corresponds to how personable
the doctor is.

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ars
> what he/she thinks about me personally as long as he performs his job well.

Those two things go together most of the time though. Someone who doesn't like
you will simply not do as good of a job. People are not robots.

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cjensen
How could any jury listen to those comments and think they were serious and
therefore constituted slander? Then there's this from a juror: "we have to
give him something, just to make sure that this doesn’t happen again." That's
not how law works! Either they committed libel or not; it's not your job as a
juror to be a parent.

Just because language is disagreeable does not mean someone should pay for it.

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stephengillie
Well, they did write some of it on his chart, and they told other people, so
apparently the entire surgery staff avoided him in post-op.

How would you feel if you went in for surgery and met the doctors and nurses,
and afterward none of them will even talk to you?

Also, it sounds like the jurists are as cynical as we are. Maybe they were
facing a "12 angry men" situation and were compromising with each other to get
it over before dinner?

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stephengillie
The part of this article that most interests me is that Virginia is a "one-
party consent" state for audio recordings, meaning that only one party has to
consent for the recording to be legal.

It seems like that's a law that's going to be more important as recording
devices become ubiquitous. Will Virginia change to a "two-party consent"
state, or will other states join Virginia? Or we just remain a landmass where
recording others is allowed in some places but not other places?

How soon until we have an iWatch that's always streaming audio and video to a
cloud server? (Dependent question: How much energy is used to record an image
from a sensor, process, frame, and route over Wifi or Cell?)

Also, there's the moral question of recording another's audio without their
consent. How do we decide (or re-decide) what the moral rules for recording
should be?

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duskwuff
Q: Does it still count as "one-party consent" if the 'consenting' party isn't
involved in (or, for that matter, even aware of) the conversation s/he is
recording?

One-party consent certainly wouldn't apply if, for instance, your friend made
a call using your telephone and you recorded the ensuing conversation. Does
this situation differ simply because the patient was physically present?

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PaulHoule
It sounds like something right out of "Dianetics," is the patient a
Scientologist by any chance?

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shenanigoat
Hopefully our robot surgeons and anesthesiologists won't be programmed to be
such horrible assholes.

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melloclello
It's worth remembering that most people who work in customer service have been
around the block so many times they hate the people they have to deal with by
default. Most folks I know who work in retail or the hospitality industry will
openly state they hate you just for walking in the door.

Professionalism be damned, whether you're a disgruntled barista or a
disgruntled anaesthesiologist, everybody needs to be able to vent by ripping
into their customers sometimes.

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ars
> these disgruntled people need to be able to vent sometimes.

That's what the break room is for. But not when on the clock.

