More about the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine and Doctor-Patient Sex

There were two letters to the editor in today's Boston Globe about the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine's decision to take away Dr. Gary Brockington's license. (See here for my original post.)

Nurse Mary Hourihan gives a perspective on Dr. Brockington's overall practice like what we've heard from patients of other physicians who have been disciplined for sexual relationships with patients:

As a nurse who has worked at the Faulkner Hospital for more than 30 years, I was shocked and saddened to read your article concerning the state Board of Registration in Medicine’s revocation of Dr. Gary Brockington’s medical license (“Board revokes Faulkner cardiologist’s license after affair,” Metro, Nov. 24). The doctor has cared for his many patients with the utmost professionalism and expertise. Although I do not work directly with him, nearly every day I hear from our mutual patients the reverence in which he is held.

The board is denying thousands of patients the skilled, sensitive care this extraordinary physician provides. I feel that Brockington and his patients deserve reconsideration of this decision.

Mary Hourihan

West Roxbury  

There's nothing surprising about the fact that a physician who displayed a serious ethical lapse with a patient may have been an excellent physician for most or almost all of his patients. (For example, see here.) In my own experience, a former colleague who I knew to be a superb physician, such that I referred one of my sons to him for allergy care, has been convicted for murdering his wife! In prison, he continues to evince the caretaking characteristics that were so prominent in his care of patients. (See here.)

Donald Ross, a physician colleague of Dr. Brockington, comes to the same conclusion I did - that if Brockington's relationship with the patient was a brief, one-time event that occurred during a period of major stress, the Board's actions were too harsh. But I don't agree with Ross that the Board's decision necessarily reflects "lack of compassion." A Board can impose a severe penalty and still regard to person being penalized with compassion, in accord with the precept that we should hate the sin but love the sinner.

In reading the story about Dr. Gary Brockington’s affair with a woman who was a patient and a co-worker, it strikes me that the reaction of the state Board of Registration in Medicine was over the top and lacked compassion in its response (“State revokes Faulkner cardiologist’s license after affair,” Metro, Nov. 24).

Perhaps there was poor judgment involved, but this does not sound like a case in which a doctor used his position in the doctor-patient relationship in an exploitative way. Brockington was also going through a difficult time in his own personal life at the time, and sometimes we don’t make our best decisions under such circumstances.

Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to require Brockington to enter a counseling program rather than imposing what is essentially a death penalty to his career.

Dr. Donald G. Ross

North Andover

As I said in my original post, if Brockington's relationship with his patient was (1) brief, (2) a single occurrence in his practice and not a pattern, (3) occurred at a time of major stress, and (4) preceded by years of responsible caretaking, than (5) permanent loss of license seems too severe a penalty. This is not a matter of compassion but of realism. Some perpetrators of unethical behavior can be rehabilitated and will be able to serve others in a reliably ethical manner.

Was the Massachusetts Board of Registration Too Harsh on this case of Doctor-Patient Sex?

The Boston Globe recently reported that the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine revoked the license of Dr. Gary Brockington, a 54 year old primary care physician and cardiologist, for having had a sexual relationship with a patient.

I've not been able to get a copy of the report from the Division of Administrative Law Appeals, so I'm entirely dependent on the Boston Globe story, which has extensive quotes from Brockington's lawyer. The story, if accurate and complete, leads me to speculate that revocation of licensure may be too severe a penalty in this specific situation.

According to the Globe, Brockington experienced a Job-like series of events in 2006. He was newly divorced, bankrupt, and depressed. During the same stretch of time his sister (his only sibling) broke her neck and was left by her husband. Brockington became legal guardian for her two young children.

One of his patients, a married woman who was a technician at the hospital where Brockington practiced, and who had worked with him on procedures, invited him to stay in her basement. According to Brockington's lawyer he told her she would have to get another primary care physician. He did, however, renew some prescriptions for her. He stayed in her home for two months. Apparently the brief sexual relationship occurred during the last two weeks of his stay. He moved out in July, 2006. The woman did not herself register a complaint.

If, as Brockington's lawyer claims, the facts show that this was a single episode in an otherwise exemplary career, it's not clear that public safety requires permanent loss of license. In other posts I've strongly supported permanent loss of license when the pattern of facts was different, as in this case. In another case, I concluded that Rhode Island was correct when it reinstated the license of a physician who participated in an extensive rehabilitation program, and agreed to continue in ongoing psychotherapy and long term supervision of practice. (see here)

The spokesman for the Massachusetts Board of Registration is quoted as saying that "the board has zero tolerance for sexual misconduct between physicians and patients." I believe that "zero tolerance" is the correct stance, but don't believe that sexual misconduct always requires permanent loss of license. If the Boston Globe article is the full story, a case can be made that this was a single, out-of-character episode that occurred in extraordinarily stressful circumstances. If that is how the Board saw the situation, I believe it acted too harshly.

Pay for Performance vs Intrinsic Motivation

Among the many stories about health care heroes during Hurricane Sandy, this was my favorite:

Allison Chisholm, 46, who works for the Visiting Nurse Service, lives with a frail mother in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When the lights started flickering during the storm on Monday, she had images of her mother falling in the dark. But she also had patients who needed her, including one receiving hospice care in a 12th floor apartment in Chinatown, and one needing an intravenous round of antibiotics in the West Village.

“It was treacherous driving during the hurricane,” said Ms. Chisholm, fitting an intravenous line into the arm of Jill Gerson, 71, who teaches social work at Lehman College in the Bronx. “But it’s just something you have to do as a nurse. That continuity of care helps the healing. I don’t see this as being heroic. I have a conscience. I need to get to sleep at night.”

Ms. Chisholm was responding to intrinsic motivation - her values as a nurse, embodying the tradition associated with Florence Nightingale and Mother Theresa. She wasn't being "incentivized" (one of my least favorite words) by pay-for-performance, unless we regard the threat from her conscience that - like Lady Macbeth - she would "sleep no more" if she failed to put her values into action as a performance management system, as an "incentivizing" force!

Pay-for-performance has considerable face validity. Extrinsic motivation clearly works in vast swathes of the economy. But as my friend Dr. Steffie Woolhandler's recent post on the Health Affairs blog shows, it's  not at all clear that pay-for-performance is effective in domains that have historically rested on intrinsic motivators such as idealism, altruism, and care. Pay-for-performance can increase the behaviors that are being measured, but evidence that these systems enhance patient outcomes is weak or absent. And there is substantial evidence from the behavioral economics literature that monetary rewards can actually decrease motivation for tasks that are intrinsically rewarding.

My own reaction when I hear of programs to "incentivize physicians to do [XYZ desirable clinical behavior]" is decidedly negative. When I began my own fee-for-service practice in the 1970s I took pleasure in including Medicaid beneficiaries, but after a time the burdensome paperwork and inefficient reimbursement process, combined with microscopic fees, acted as a disincentive for doing what I wanted to do, and I limited the number of Medicaid beneficiaries I took on. I didn't need to be "incentivized" but I would have responded well to a reduction of disincentives.

Rats in a Skinner box are "incentivized" by food pellets. But as the interview with Ms. Chisholm reflects, the kinds of caretaking we want to encourage in medicine flows from values, not P4P pellets. Program managers will do better by recognizing, respecting, and supporting intrinsic motivation. This is best done by removing impediments, not by the condescending view of doctors and nurses as reluctant laborers.