Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Culture of Secrecy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture of Secrecy. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Medical culture encourages doctors to avoid admitting mistakes

By Lawrence Schlachter
STAT News
Originally published on January 13, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

In reality, the factor that most influences doctors to hide or disclose medical errors should be clear to anyone who has spent much time in the profession: The culture of medicine frowns on admitting mistakes, usually on the pretense of fear of malpractice lawsuits.

But what’s really at risk are doctors’ egos and the preservation of a system that lets physicians avoid accountability by ignoring problems or shifting blame to “the system” or any culprit other than themselves.

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What is a patient to do in this environment? The first thing is to be aware of your own predisposition to take everything your doctor says at face value. Listen closely and you may hear cause for more intense questioning.

You will likely never hear the terms negligence, error, mistake, or injury in a hospital. Instead, these harsh but truthful words and phrases are replaced with softer ones like accident, adverse event, or unfortunate outcome. If you hear any of these euphemisms, ask more questions or seek another opinion from a different doctor, preferably at a different facility.

Most doctors would never tell a flagrant lie. But in my experience as a neurosurgeon and as an attorney, too many of them resort to half-truths and glaring omissions when it comes to errors. Beware of passive language like “the patient experienced bleeding” rather than “I made a bad cut”; attributing an error to random chance or a nameless, faceless system; or trivialization of the consequences of the error by claiming something was “a blessing in disguise.”

The article is here.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

How Unethical Behavior Becomes Habit

by Francesca Gino, Lisa D. Ordóñez and David Welsh
Harvard Business Review Blog
Originally posted September 4, 2014

When a former client’s secretary was arrested for embezzlement years before his own crimes were uncovered, Bernie Madoff commented to his own secretary, “Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.”

We now know that Madoff’s Ponzi scheme started when he engaged in misreporting to cover relatively small financial losses. Over a 15-year period, the scam grew steadily, eventually ballooning to $65 billion, even as regulators and investors failed to notice the warning signs.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Why Can’t the Banking Industry Solve Its Ethics Problems?

By Neil Irwin
The New York Times
Originally published July 29, 2014

The financial crisis that nearly brought down the global economy was triggered in no small part by the aggressive culture and spotty ethics within the world’s biggest banks. But after six years and countless efforts to reform finance, the banking scandals never seem to end.

The important question that doesn’t yet have a satisfying answer is why.

Why are the ethical breaches at megabanks so routine that it is hard to keep them straight? Why do banks seem to have so many scandals — and ensuing multimillion dollar legal settlements — compared with other large companies like retailers, airlines or manufacturers?

The entire story is here.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Executive Beware: The SEC Now Wants To Police Unethical Corporate Conduct

By John Carney and Jenna Felz
Forbes
Originally posted on June 26, 2014


With the appointment of Chairwoman Mary Jo White, President Obama made clear that a tough cop would run the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and make enforcement a top priority.  This pro-enforcement, “tough cop,” stance is nothing new to an agency with a storied history of investigating and civilly prosecuting some of the biggest frauds on Wall Street.  But what is new is the Chairwoman’s tactical decision to redeploy significant enforcement resources on small, non-criminal violations.  Chairwoman White underscored the importance of the SEC’s role as “tough cop” especially in cases “when there is no criminal violation,” declaring that the SEC “is the only agency that can play that role.”  These bold statements signal the SEC’s renewed focus on policing not only illegal, but also unethical, conduct.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Corruption in Business and the Importance of Ethics

By Vivek Wadhwa
The Wall Street Journal Blog - The Accelerators
Originally published June 28, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

How can companies do better? Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies.

Business executives need to start by spelling out and communicating their values. Then they need to lead by example. This means getting rid of the bad apples and declining opportunities that bring instant wealth at the cost of selling one’s soul.

Corporate culture is built from the top down. Employees embrace the ethics and values of their leaders. You simply can’t have one set of standards for management and another for staff. Every executive and employee needs to be held accountable.

Employees need to be encouraged to speak up when they see wrongdoing — to “speak truth to power.” And when a mistake is made, it is better to deal with the immediate fallout rather than allow it to build its own momentum. A corporate culture that doesn’t allow for mistakes is destined for disaster. The best strategy is to encourage employees to come clean and learn from their errors.

The worst is when employees are pressured to hide information. A company can usually survive short term snags. But covering up a problem is likely to create even bigger problems later on.  No truth remains hidden forever.

The entire article is here.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Boy Scout Files Give Glimpse Into 20 Years of Sex Abuse

By Kirk Johnson
The New York Times
Originally published October 18, 2012

Details of decades of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America, and what child welfare experts say was a corrosive culture of secrecy that compounded the damage, were cast into full public view for the first time on Thursday with the release of thousands of pages of documents describing abuse accusations across the country.

“The secrets are out,” said Kelly Clark, a lawyer whose firm obtained the files as evidence in an $18.5 million civil judgment against the Scouts in 2010. The legal effort to make the files public, by a group of national and local media outlets, including The New York Times — and represented by another lawyer, Charles F. Hinkle — resulted in an Oregon Supreme Court decision in June ordering full release. Mr. Clark said in a news conference that the database would be sortable by state, year and name.
      
Officials with the Boy Scouts fought in the courts for years to prevent the release of the documents — more than 15,000 pages detailing accusations of sexual abuse against 1,247 scout leaders between 1965 and 1985, with thousands of victims involved, perhaps many thousands — contending that fear of breached confidentiality could inhibit victims from reporting other instances of abuse.