John Oliver highlights patient safety, KXAN med. board reports
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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Comedian John Oliver kicked off Patient Safety Awareness Week by highlighting KXAN’s ongoing “Still Practicing” investigation into doctor transparency during Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight on Max.
The March 10 episode (season 11, episode 4) centered around problems with state medical boards across the country. Oliver featured two KXAN reports into the Texas Medical Board, a culture of lax punishment and a lack of transparency when it comes to physician discipline records.
The episode comes at the start of Patient Safety Awareness Week, which the American Hospital Association says is an “opportunity to raise awareness” about patient safety.
Oliver spoke about the “white coat code of silence” when it comes to “reticence about punishing fellow doctors.”
“In fact, even when medical boards initially hand down harsher punishments, doctors can still negotiate lighter sanctions with them, which boards too often can contrive weird excuses to do,” Oliver said.
“Take this case of a doctor who was eventually convicted for illegally writing prescriptions for over a million pain pills,” he said, before showing a portion of KXAN’s investigation – which found one doctor whose license was suspended, then reinstated after 10 months, because the Texas Medical Board cited “mitigating factors” like he “expressed remorse;” had a “genuine misunderstanding” of pain management requirements; and was a “very young and inexperienced physician” – even though he was 46-years-old at the time and had been practicing in Texas for over a decade, records showed.
“Yeah, I don’t know if 46 counts as ‘young and inexperienced.’ I’m 46 and I’ve been doing this job for over a decade and people can say many things about me … no one would say ‘very young and inexperienced,'” Oliver joked. “It’s just objectively not true.”
Oliver also cited reports that some state medical boards don’t check the National Practitioner Data Bank.
“Some states, until recently Texas, even employed an ‘honor-system approach’ which relies on physicians to self-report,” he said, quoting from a KXAN investigation.
“But, guess what?,” Oliver said. “The bad doctors tend not to do that because, you know, they’re bad doctors.”
He also brought up a KXAN investigation which found doctors coming to Texas to escape problematic pasts.
“So, unsurprising when a Texas news station bothered to look into who was practicing in their state they found ’49 doctors’ who’d had their ‘medical licenses suspended, revoked, or surrendered’ in other states,” he said, quoting a KXAN investigation. “And some of the stories were shocking.”
Among the findings: a neurosurgeon who operated on the wrong spinal disc practicing, at the time, with a clean record on their Texas Medical Board public physician profile.
“It’s true. A surgeon who operated on the wrong part of someone’s spine still had a clean bill of health in Texas,” Oliver said. “And you know who probably doesn’t? His [expletive] patient.”
Texas Watch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer advocacy group, said lives are “stolen” each year by “preventable medical errors.”
“A small number of dangerous doctors commit the majority of the harm to patients,” the group posted to social media to mark the start of Patient Safety Week. “Take one minute to ensure your doctor isn’t one of them. Texans can look up their doctor here: tmb.state.tx.us.”
Under a new Texas law – a direct result of KXAN’s investigations – the Texas Medical Board is required to enroll all physicians with continuous monitoring through the National Practitioner Data Bank and keep their public profiles up-to-date when alerted to any disciplinary actions.
“When investigative journalists, advocates, and lawmakers can come together, the truth comes to light and problems are solved,” said Texas Watch Executive Director Ware Wendell. “That’s exactly what happened here, and patient safety is better in Texas as a result.”
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