Would any of you care to share any recent lawsuit experiences, whether it involved you or someone else? As posted in a different thread, this happened to me a couple of years ago:
In my 2nd year of med school I was with a FM preceptor talking about a patient when the office manager actually interrupted us to tell the doc that a patient just filed a suit for delayed diagnosis of lung cancer. The doc looked at the plaintiff's name and scoffed. "There are plenty of entries in his chart stating that he denied all my recommendations to get CXRs or cancer workups." Hopefully he was right, but it was still rather shocking to my naive ideas of FM to not only see the doc get sued but also see his "matter-of-fact" attitude about it. We just went on our usual work after that. I don't think I could concentrate after being told I was getting sued.
Another true story involves a different doc (not an FM doc, though). She was ready to go on vacation when she got a call from her group informing her that a patient had sent a letter that stated he (the patient) was thinking of suing her. She immediately cancelled her vacation and spent the time going over the charts, etc. in preparation for the lawsuit (her first lawsuit). The end result? The patient never filed the lawsuit and the doc not only went through a mini-hell, but lost her vacation time. Sucks.
In my 2nd year of med school I was with a FM preceptor talking about a patient when the office manager actually interrupted us to tell the doc that a patient just filed a suit for delayed diagnosis of lung cancer. The doc looked at the plaintiff's name and scoffed. "There are plenty of entries in his chart stating that he denied all my recommendations to get CXRs or cancer workups." Hopefully he was right, but it was still rather shocking to my naive ideas of FM to not only see the doc get sued but also see his "matter-of-fact" attitude about it. We just went on our usual work after that. I don't think I could concentrate after being told I was getting sued.
Another true story involves a different doc (not an FM doc, though). She was ready to go on vacation when she got a call from her group informing her that a patient had sent a letter that stated he (the patient) was thinking of suing her. She immediately cancelled her vacation and spent the time going over the charts, etc. in preparation for the lawsuit (her first lawsuit). The end result? The patient never filed the lawsuit and the doc not only went through a mini-hell, but lost her vacation time. Sucks.
