A question of ethics.

[gbate]

I am torn about a situation at work and I wanted some input.

I work for a doctor who has an office at a community hospital. He is a specialist who sees patients for consultation before they come back for testing at the hospital. (I'm being purposely vague here, sorry)

Our hospital has a free clinic which sees many homeless and uninsured people in our community. When the patients go to the clinic, they are sometimes referred to our department and our doctor for consultation and then later testing.

For a few weeks, we were getting about 3 referrals a week from the clinic, so now we have many clinic patients scheduled to see the doctor and to get testing.

Our office manager decided that "the doctor will freak if he knows about all of these clinic patients" and now she (along with the doctor) have started limiting the number of these patients. Also, they have decided that the doctor will not spend as much time in consultation with these patients as paying patients. To make matters worse, IMO, the office manager is now in the process of calling some of the already scheduled patients and moving their appointments so that we don't have too many of them in one week.

The office manager has made comments such as, "of course these people have ____ disorder, they are living in a box or a homeless shelter!" She has obvious prejudice for these patients based upon these comments and similar ones.

This doctor has a thriving practice and is not hurting for patients. I know it is not my call to make, but I think that purposely providing less care for these people is just wrong.

[yewberry]

1. The office manager is dead wrong.

People are referred from the clinic because they need care, regardless of socio-economic status. Seems to me that what the doctor and office manager are doing may be drifting from completely unethical and immoral behavior into legally questionable acts.

Not only are they discriminating against people, they're acting as gatekeepers by delaying or denying care from the hospital. If the office won't provide care for people that are referred to them, the clinic should find a different doctor to refer patients to. Is the clinic aware of this?

Sorry you work with such heartless shits.