Nurse Vs. Doctor

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times about the hierarchy of doctors. It claims that the vanity of some older doctors could potentially jeopardize the health of their patients, and that it's important for younger, less-experienced doctors to be heard, and not feel like they're whistleblowers when they disagree with their elders.

The article discusses this problem in a hospital environment, but it can also be true in smaller, office practices. At the last place I worked, a young nurse caught a mistake an older doctor had made. On the surface, he was grateful, but there was an obvious resentment that played out over time.

She was new, this nurse, and so there were some mistakes she made as part of her learning curve. The older doctor caught many of them and often rudely corrected her in front of the other staff. He was the lynchpin of the practice, the senior doctor who brought in the most patients, so no one told him to lay off, even though we all knew what he was doing. Eventually, she quit.

There's a lot of unspoken behavior in medical offices. I'd like to think that because we all have firsthand knowledge of life's fragility, our vanity and ego could be punctured like a children's balloon. Sometimes, that's true, but more often than not we function on an obvious but unacknowledged hierarchy.

Which makes sense. After all, I'm not a doctor. My opinion regarding the health of a patient is never going to carry the same weight, nor should it. The beauty of our office (and I'd suspect most offices) is the doctors maintain their authority by listening and questioning themselves. There isn 't one among them who wouldn't lend an ear to a colleague--doctor or nurse--if they had a serious concern.

And that's how it should be. The practice of medicine is not about glorifying the doctor. It's about treating the patient, by any means necessary. What do you think?