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Hasan Fallout - Army Deficient In Credentialing Physicians
A federal watchdog took a bite out of military hospitals this month, warning it is impossible to tell if some doctors are licensed, properly trained and evaluated in their specialties.

"Army oversight and physician credentialing and privileging requirements were not sufficient to assure that MTFs (Medical Treatment Facilities) fully complied with existing requirements or completely documented information needed to support credentialing and privileging decisions," said the new General Accountability Office report.
This involves a lot more than Hasan. Most military docs come in from outside the military: they do medical school as civilians and join later, or they take a military scholarship in med school and then payback their time after they complete their basic training.

Hasan was military all the way from medical school to residency to assignment. So the licensing and credentialing was never an issue.
In some cases the military had failed to check properly on the legitimacy of doctors' licenses to practice medicine, the report alleged.

Congress called for the report in the aftermath of the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting in November 2009, for which an Army psychiatrist is charged with 13 murders.

Congress and the military have examined how Maj. Nidal Hasan was trained, evaluated and promoted as a military physician. Nine military officials, including doctors, were disciplined for their actions or failures in the Hasan case. He faces a court-martial, with a possible death penalty, in March.

The GAO report cast a wider net and urged the Defense Department to speed up its efforts to revise and standardize reviews of doctors' credentials.

That's a good thing to do and should have been done even without the prompting that the Hasan situation elicited.
And it singles out the Army for problems at its facilities.

"Based on our review of 150 credentials files at the five Army MTFs we selected for our review, we found that none of the five Army MTFs fully complied with certain Army physician credentialing and privileging requirements," the GAO report said.
Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-12-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=335876