Anesthesiologist trashes sedated patient

Clincians are a bit different to customer service agents. A doctor can kill you.

This court case is not about enforcing rules (we know that rules based cultures leave plenty of room for abuse). It's about driving values. Have some mechanism for blowing off steam, but when you're with a patient you give that person the best care you can.

When clinicians let their empathy slip you get real, severe, abuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Hospital_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winterbourne_View_hospital_abu...

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20060502043818/htt...

The article claims $200,000 in punitive damages... which means the claim was $300,000 in actual damages? It's hard to imagine what damages the patient suffered besides embarrassment.

It seems very pat. It sounds like everyone in the theatre was ripping into the guy, which suggests a backstory in pre-op. And then the recorder was accidentally left on.

I wasn't in the room, obviously, and there's probably much more information that influenced the jury. But still, weird.

Edit: the recorder wasn't "accidentally" left on, the patient turned it on before the operation to capture post-op instructions.

I've done this before (after checking state law of course). I only made a recording because of simple curiosity. When I listened to it afterward, I discovered that nothing was said during the procedure other than that which related to the work being performed. (What was hilarious though were my attempts to speak after waking up.)

Sometimes it's not possible to do this in an elaborate surgery where you have to remove all of your clothing.

I couldn't care less about the surgeon's personality (bedside manner) or what he/she thinks about me personally as long as he performs his job well.

I think a much bigger problem in the medical field is the lack of performance review. I remember reading one study that provided video recordings of gastric bypass surgery to a panel of experts (professors, top-rated surgeons, etc.). The experts did not know who performed the surgeries, but they gave each surgery video a "quality" score. After a year, the outcome of each patient was compared to the quality score, and strong correlations were noted.

Yet despite rankings of universities, professors, cars, computers, books, and anything else one could possibly rank, you won't find rankings of how good surgeons or anesthesiologists are at their job. Oh sure, you'll get some subjective metric of how people feel about the doctor (sites like HealthGrades), but it's been shown this really corresponds to how personable the doctor is.

How could any jury listen to those comments and think they were serious and therefore constituted slander? Then there's this from a juror: "we have to give him something, just to make sure that this doesn’t happen again." That's not how law works! Either they committed libel or not; it's not your job as a juror to be a parent.

Just because language is disagreeable does not mean someone should pay for it.

The part of this article that most interests me is that Virginia is a "one-party consent" state for audio recordings, meaning that only one party has to consent for the recording to be legal.

It seems like that's a law that's going to be more important as recording devices become ubiquitous. Will Virginia change to a "two-party consent" state, or will other states join Virginia? Or we just remain a landmass where recording others is allowed in some places but not other places?

How soon until we have an iWatch that's always streaming audio and video to a cloud server? (Dependent question: How much energy is used to record an image from a sensor, process, frame, and route over Wifi or Cell?)

Also, there's the moral question of recording another's audio without their consent. How do we decide (or re-decide) what the moral rules for recording should be?

It sounds like something right out of "Dianetics," is the patient a Scientologist by any chance?

Hopefully our robot surgeons and anesthesiologists won't be programmed to be such horrible assholes.

It's worth remembering that most people who work in customer service have been around the block so many times they hate the people they have to deal with by default. Most folks I know who work in retail or the hospitality industry will openly state they hate you just for walking in the door.

Professionalism be damned, whether you're a disgruntled barista or a disgruntled anaesthesiologist, everybody needs to be able to vent by ripping into their customers sometimes.