The Urgent Care “Doctor”
Niran Al-Agba, MD is a pediatrician and the author of Patients at Risk: The Rise of the Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant in Healthcare. She has written an amazing article in the New Republic called When Your Doctor Isn’t a Doctor: Thousands of urgent care clinics have popped up over the last decade. How safe are they? I highly recommend you read it. First of all, we at AM applaud the guts of Dr. Al-Agba and Dr. Bernard who continue to speak out about this travesty in healthcare. These doctors are constantly attacked for their views, which are to PROTECT PATIENTS from non-doctors with poor education and training. And somehow this is a bad thing? From Dr. Al-Agba:
My view, obviously informed by my own training, is that while N.P.s, P.A.s, and nurses are integral members of the health care team, their role should be circumscribed: In primary care, emergency, and specialty settings, they should work under direct supervision.
The article points out case after case of malpractice done by those ill-equipped to work without supervision. But there is the craziest part:
More empirical examinations of the urgent care sector are needed. But they won’t be easily forthcoming. Privately owned facilities, which make up 70 percent of the urgent care market, are under no obligation to turn over information for research purposes. And secrecy and self-censorship abound. Indeed, physicians employed at large health organizations composed in part of urgent care facilities have been dismissed merely for discussing the difference between nurse practitioners and physicians. In one high-profile case, Dr. Steve Maron, an Arizona pediatrician, was fired from United Community Health Center’s Green Valley clinic after writing an opinion piece headlined “ARE NPS SAME AS MDS?” His employers terminated him for violating the organization’s “principle of mutual respect.”
Censorship? Woke hospitals defining what mutual respect is?
Please read the whole article and share it. Also, buy Dr. Al-Agba’s book.
” WE MUST HANG TOGETHER OR SURELY WE SHALL HANG SEPARATELY” Ben Franklin
(Editor’s Note: As this blog has been going for 22 years most militant NPs know now not to waste their time ganging up and commenting here. If you are new and want to rage about how “NPs are the same as docs” then go ahead. I just delete those comments.)
Do you think maybe the bigger issue is the corporate practice of medicine?
I mean, I’m not trying to say the scope of practice thing is not important.
The article mentions Urgent Care clinics being bought up by investment firms and hiring unsupervised or inadequately supervised nonphysicians to maximize profit.
Oh, and I linked this article in another post, not noticing that you were all over it already. Sorry ’bout that.
Med students would do well to read this. Sonofabitch…
I recently learned that South Dakota will allow PAs to practice independent of any supervision.