Showing posts with label More Reform Needed: State Boards Need to Increase Acces to Disciplinary Information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label More Reform Needed: State Boards Need to Increase Acces to Disciplinary Information. Show all posts

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Repost: More Reform Needed: State Boards Need to Increase Access to Disciplinary Information

Another Area in Need of Reform:  State Pharmacy, Medical and Veterinary Boards need to increase access to disciplinary information and make it more readily available.
How does someone know if a pharmacy, veterinarian or doctor has been disciplined?  This is not an easy task. If, for example, a pharmacy has been discplined by the FDA for a compounding issue, a warning letter will have been issued. The warning letters are available on the FDA website.
But how does one find out if that pharmacy has been disciplined in one of the 50 states?  Each state has its own disciplinary process and procedures and each has its own laws regarding whether this information has to be made available to the public.  For example, inn Michigan, the Michigan Public Health Code, P.A. 368 of 1978, as Amended, mandated that the Department of Consumer & Industry Services is required to publish the names and addresses of disciplined individuals.

In Texas, the April 2004 Sunset Commission recommendation that the Texas board should post information about disciplinary orders and sanctions on its web site in a format that consumers can easily access.   The Texas Veterimarian Board of Medical Examiners publishes an alphabetical list of disciplinary actions dating back to 1970. Included are the name of the practitioner, date of action, violation, summary and sanction.  Click here.  Other states, such as Oklahoma publish disciplinary actions on their web sites - either as disciplinary lists, in Board Minutes, or as licensee lookup by name.