Doctors: Double Standard for Residents at Parkland, UT Southwestern
The Dallas Morning News—August 2nd, 2010
It was a Monday morning quarterback session of sorts, as faculty surgeons from UT Southwestern Medical Center met to review cases of medical mistakes.
In one instance, resident doctors-in-training had failed to properly secure an artery during an appendectomy at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the school’s main teaching facility. The patient had to be rushed back into surgery the next day because of internal bleeding.
The faculty surgeon who was supposed to supervise the residents said they did not notify him that they were taking the patient to surgery. He learned of it, he said, only after the operation was under way and while he was working on a trauma victim in Parkland’s emergency room.
That was standard operating procedure at Dallas County’s charity hospital, where “the resident gets to decide” on patient care, Dr. Raminder Nirula told The Dallas Morning News.
Procedures were different at the two hospitals owned by UT Southwestern, where faculty physicians see their privately insured patients, said Nirula and other former doctors who shared his concerns.
“Even though these hospitals are under the same roof, there’s two different levels of care,” said Nirula, a former surgery supervisor who quit UT Southwestern in protest in 2007 after a year.
Read More: The Dallas Morning News
