The parents who saw my professional guts splattered all over the local “non-profit” hospital’s wall did not raise their daughter to run from a fight.

And I’m sorry. These people are just NOT going to get away with what they did to me . . . if I have to chase them to hell and back for another decade. The really beautiful thing about perjury is that it is one of the few crimes that has no statute of limitations. If I’ve learned anything, it’s patience.

My license actually DID NOT earn me just as much somewhere else. For this hospital was thorough in its malice. I was black-balled for miles locally – and had to hit the road as a Locums in order to survive. For a long while, the jobs I got were not at the high end of the Pediatric pay grade (which does not have a high pay grade to start with). Toss in paying the lawyers (to litigate) and I was scraping bottom for a long time. It took years to recover – and by recover I mean make anything near a salary approximating what I should have been making all along (during what should have been the best earning years of my life) – NOT truly recover lost time and money.

Part of living well now for me is blogging about what happened, and working (1) to put the lying jerks in jail and (2) really reform a system of “oversight” that let me swing in the wind for doing the right thing by a patient literally dying because of someone else’s arrogance and ignorance.

The parents of that child send me a Christmas card every year with just her picture on it. I know I did the right thing. It’s far past the time for the hospital to answer for what it did – to me, and tot them.

It’s been my experience that my reputation preceeds me these days – and it’s a good thing. Apart from weeding out situations/people I would not want to work with anyway, the people I work with now (1) appreciate my clinical experience (in a variety of settings) and (2) respect what I’ve been through – and what I could do if my chain is pulled again.

Believe it or not, blogging has actually leveled the playing field considerably – it’s given me a professional power I did not have before – and set me free in a way that silence and fear-of-what-someone-else-thought never did.

I am finding great satisfaction in that this hospital management “team” is having a lot of difficulty recruiting “dime-a-dozen” Pediatricians these days. The word is out.

What goes around . . .

The most precious asset that a physician has is their reputation. You can not get into a argument with a skunk and not come out smelling. Even if you win, you lose. One can on the other take ones skills and energy elsewhere. That and living well are the ultimate revenge. Your license will earn you just as much somewhere else so there is no financial penalty to doing so. If it is satisfaction in seeing them pay that you want, you can be satisfied in knowing that they had to bear the costs describing in the article above.

And we’re on the same side, you say? Like I said, nice.

I might have been able to put my situation behind me – had it not happened in my own hometown – and had I not been professionally eviscerated in full view of my parents, family and friends. My Mother and Father got to read that I was a “liar” in the Sunday newspaper.

Try it sometime, and see how you feel.

Of course, the people that called me a liar turned out to be liars themselves – as they cut and ran (and have yet to be prosecuted for crimes that have no statute of limitation).

I have decided that it is better to fight back. Because maybe if enough of us told our stories (instead of cutting our losses, tucking tail and running – your solution) . . . maybe, just maybe, all of those so-called reformers out there would LISTEN and actually do something to STOP the madness.

For instance, it would only take one or two high-profile cases against a hospital or practice management team being criminally prosecuted to change a whole lot of the bad/pathological behavior you bemoan.

HCQIA got its start with mere civil litigation.

Enforcing the law to benefit/vindicate a doctor. What a concept!

One more thing: If I can keep one naive, idealistic newbie from making the mistakes I did, it’s more than worth it.

The result wasn’t that the optimistic congenial happy people stayed, rather they left sooner rather than later. Those who stayed longer were either those without the self-confidence to make a change descending in a spiral of learned helplessness and passive-aggressive resistance–or those with enough power in the organization to protect themselves from the BS.

I have decided that it is better to get out sooner rather than later when you realize you are in that kind of situation–cut your losses and put it behind you. Stay too long and you may find yourself and embittered obsessive telling your story over and over and over and over on internet blogs.

I take him at his word. Those things are nice. But his statement is at best superficial, acknowledging that getting unhappy people who quit or are fired can be expensive and frustrating, but not really examining why employment relationships that go well go that way and why those that do not fail. He never gets to the how and why, only to suggest in a oblique way that hiring people who are happy and stay happy is all that is needed, and to suggest that unhappy doctors were somehow naturally unhappy and inclined to have unsatisfying and failed professional employee experiences. I don’t really buy that conclusion and I think understanding successful and unsuccessful physician employee experiences requires a little more examination than he is giving it.

For example, does your practice make promises that it dishonors? (Or does it delay buy-in discussions or exercise unfair leverage in equity buy-in and practice control–selling someone a “share” of the practice but without proportionate control?) Are equity owners fair to employee physicians? (Or do they exercise unreasonable privileges of cherry picking patients by coverage and dump call and other duties on non-equity employees that should be fairly shared?)

I think it is wise to always remember who has the power in these relationships and understand that the employers are the ones who almost always set the tone of the employer-employee relationship, not the employed physician. It is the employers that chart the course for success and conversely, the employer who is largely responsible for things not working out as hoped. Sorry, but that is the way power works. And I say that as a once-unhappy employee who is now boss, owner and employer.

If Dr.Jeff Brown thinks successful employment of doctors is all or mostly about attitude and can tell this reader why that its true, I am all ears. But I really think he has failed to apply much insight into his role as employer or to show that he properly understands how important his actions are in making the outcomes he says he wants.

Bad managers abound in medicine – especially “non-profit” and government medicine. They skim their livings off the top of a doctor’s labor – while often offering little in the way of “respect” or appreciation.

And being on “the team” can (more often than not) translate into being a yes-man or yes woman pandering to the fiscal bottom line – as opposed to being a true advocate for the patient.

In short, there are some teams a doctor does not want to be on.

As we attempt to “reform” medicine, a lot of people want to hand it all over to the government to run. It’s a very bad idea. You see, I SERVED in the National Health Service Program – a Federal program in which a doctor’s loans are paid off in return for service to an under-served area.

And I was badly burned in that service (in my case, to my own hometown) because the government, while focusing a great deal of time and attention on the recruitment aspect of the program, did next-to-nothing to “protect its own” and ensure that the retention aspect of the agreement was honored.

In my case there is NO QUESTION that I was in the right. But a pandering/power-hungrey middle manager was making all of the decisions and NO ONE in a position of oversight was questioning his actions or motives.

There was no peer review and zero due process (supposedly required aspects of the program), and no checks or balances to ensure that the people who employed me were playing fair. And/so, a situation that might have been halted in its tracks with two or three phone calls from Washington festered and morphed and has dragged on for eleven years – all because the Federal government could not be bothered to enforce ALL aspects of its own site agreements . . . and now is not at all concerned with enforcing the law.

Ergo, hundreds of thousands of dollars used to recruit me and one of my “partners” to this particular practice were poured down the drain (as my partner, beyond disgusted, also left town after I was fired).

That’s a whole lot of tax money spent for naught. But no one blinked an eye. Good Pediatricians were “a dime a dozen” according to the hospital VP.

But hey, let’s give the government more to police. Let’s put the careers of more good doctors in their incompetent/disinterested hands.

What I would like to see the USDHHS types now suddenly interested in my blog (I have StatCounter) to do is (for once) hold a hospital management “team” accountable for its despicable, malicious, retaliatory actions against a good physician.

In other words, acknowledge that there are two sides to the employment relationship – and it’s not always the doctor who is at fault when that relationship sours.

That would be change I could believe in.