WNEG-TV

MASSACHUSETTS - Patients trust doctors with their lives. But a new study shows doctors who don't trust one another might not report it. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital surveyed doctors around the country, and found 64% said they would report a colleague who was impaired or incompetent. But that leaves more than a third who wouldn't.

Study co-author Catherine DesRoches says fixing the problem requires education for doctors and patients.

"Medicine's not necessarily going to regulate itself, so if you do have an interaction with a physician where you believe that physician may have been impaired, then you can report that physician yourself, as a patient. I don't think I would say that there's a code of silence. I think that what I would say is most physicians see this as a very complicated issue, and it's not something that's easy to take on. Some of the things that we're hoping will happen are more education for physicians around their responsibilities around this issue, that it is their responsibility to report. Also perhaps some changes to the ways reports are made, so greater confidentiality protections for physicians, and perhaps even some kind of confidential feedback system for reporters so that they know what happened to their report when they made one."

The study shows that 17 percent of those surveyed had encountered a physician who was impaired or incompetent during the past three years.

About two-thirds of them did report their colleagues.