The characteristics of physicians disciplined by professional colleges in Canada.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The identification of health care professionals who are incompetent, impaired, uncaring or have criminal intent has received increasing attention in recent years. These individuals are often subject to disciplinary action by professional licensing authorities. To date, no national data exist for Canadian physicians disciplined for professional misconduct. We sought to describe the characteristics of physicians disciplined by Canadian professional licensing authorities. METHODS: We constructed a database of physicians disciplined by provincial licensing authorities during the years 2000 to 2009. Comparisons were made with the general population of physicians licensed in Canada. Data on demographic characteristics, type of misconduct and penalty imposed were collected for each disciplined physician. RESULTS: A total of 606 identifiable physicians were disciplined by their professional college during the years 2000 to 2009. The proportion of licensed physicians who were disciplined in a given year ranged from 0.06% to 0.11%. Fifty-one of the disciplined physicians committed 64 repeat offences, accounting for a total of 113 (19%) offences. Most of the disciplined physicians were independent practitioners (99%), male (92%) and trained in Canada (67%). The most common specialties of physicians subject to disciplinary action were family medicine (62%), psychiatry (14%) and surgery (9%). For disciplined physicians, the average number of years from medical school graduation to disciplinary action was 28.9 (standard deviation [SD] = 11.3). The 3 most frequent violations were sexual misconduct (20%), failure to meet a standard of care (19%) and unprofessional conduct (16%). The 3 most frequently imposed penalties were fines (27%), suspensions (19%) and formal reprimands (18%). INTERPRETATION: A small proportion of registered physicians in Canada were disciplined by their medical licensing authorities. Sexual misconduct was the most common disciplined offence. The standardization of provincial reporting along with the creation of a national database of physician offenders would facilitate more comparable public reporting as well as further research and educational initiatives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".