BUSINESSNo practice is immune: Substance abuse can affect anyoneDealing with an impaired employee or physician is a challenge any doctor's office may face. Establishing a policy on substance abuse and concentrating on treatment instead of punitive action can help.By Carrie Printz, amednews correspondent. Jan. 16, 2006. If all the statistics are to be believed, there's a chance your practice at some point could have an employee, perhaps even a physician, struggling with drug or alcohol abuse. It can be an issue for your practice beyond merely the performance and health of one employee. An employee's substance abuse problem can have a negative impact in terms of decreased productivity, absenteeism, turnover and medical costs. It also has the added impact in a physician's office of potentially harming patients. If an employee has a problem, or if you even suspect an employee has a problem, your instinct might be to act on it quickly. But you face a thicket of ethical and legal questions that could leave you with no simple solution in dealing with it. On one hand, you want to do everything you can to protect patients from any harm the employee could cause. On the other, employee privacy issues, Americans with Disabilities Act regulations and even the high cost of training a new worker come into play in how to treat an employee who might have a substance abuse problem. "You're not going to throw someone away for asthma or diabetes," says Harold Urschel, MD, an addiction psychiatrist in Dallas. Substance abuse, he says, must be treated the same way. Experts say there are two ways to approach the problem. The first way is to have a written policy on substance abuse in advance. Any such policy should either be developed by or reviewed by legal counsel. The policy can be included in an employment contract, an employee manual or as a stand-alone policy. In any case, it is important that the employee read and sign the policy. The policy should clearly outline what the practice will do if substance abuse is suspected. [...]Full text of American Medical News content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2006 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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