I'm Not a Doctor, But I Play One In The Waiting Room...

When I first read this article about a man who impersonated a medical professional for two weeks, I laughed. I mean, think about it: this man spent TWO WEEKS shadowing actual doctors and nurses and interacting with patients, and no one noticed. Really? And so I laughed because:

            a) That takes some serious balls
            b) Those employees take oblivious to an entirely new level
            c) He was probably nicer to the patients than some of the actual doctors and nurses

Being a member of healthcare services myself, however strenuous a tie as that may be, I was amazed that someone could actually spend that long impersonating a resident-in-training and not be caught. I mean, he's interacting with actual doctors and actual nurses, and NONE of them noticed that he wasn't, you know, actually employed by the hospital.

After I laughed, I became concerned. While at my facility I can't actually imagine anyone pretending to be an actual medical professional, we are not a huge establishment in comparison with incredibly large facilities. I work the front desk of an Emergency Department five days out of the week, and I know for a fact that I don't know all of the doctors and nurses that work in the ED, not to mention the Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practitioners. There are a lot of them, and I am merely a peon one person in a large machine. To my knowledge, the doctors all know each other, but maybe they don't. If the doctors and nurses know that they won't recognize all of the other doctors, they won't think it odd to find someone they don't know acting like a doctor.

One of the most important things that I have learned in my years at my job are that people will do anything. Not for profit or because they are mental, but simply because. Security at our new state-of-the-art facility is increasing in a major way, and we have made huge changes in our patient registration policies over the past year alone in an effort to keep people from committing medical fraud. It's an echo of the state of the rest of the world, I think, where there is a growing number of people committed to getting what they need/want/think they deserve at the expense of others simply because they don't want to pay for it. The other side of that coin is that people will do whatever they want just because they want to.

Worst case scenario? This man would not have had access to medicine or prescription pads or other things, because all of that is monitored with computers these days. But even if he just told a patient that they were fine and should go home and avoid expensive tests, he might be endangering the life of someone who is potentially having a heart attack or is on the verge of a ruptured appendix.

I laughed about the obliviousness of the healthcare professionals, but the truth is, you cannot work in the medical profession and not pay attention to the people around you and what they are doing. Not only will you not know when the new cute Doctor and the reluctant Nurse finally get their groove on, you could miss something vital that could cause serious harm to your patients, and there is no excuse for that.