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Record W1884628670

Covering for a colleague: more than a medicolegal issue.

2005· letter· en· W1884628670 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
James Goertzen

Bibliographic record

VenuePubMed · 2005
Typeletter
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicMedical Malpractice and Liability Issues
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContext (archaeology)WorkloadDutyChristian ministryAcquiescenceHealth careCover (algebra)MedicineNursingPsychologyManagementLawPolitical scienceHistory
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The question of responsibility for reviewing a colleague’s orders for nursing home patients was raised in the February 2005 issue of Canadian Family Physician in the context of agreeing to “assist” a colleague during an illness lasting several months.1 When I stand back and look at this from a distance, I see a different picture. The questioner admits to having difficulty finding time to cover for his or her colleague because of an already excessive workload. In this context, I think that covering for a colleague during illness has a number of undesirable side effects that are often overlooked. First, increasing the workload of an already overburdened physician makes medicolegal mishap more likely. The physician is effectively being blackmailed to review the colleague’s orders, “or the patients will not be able to get their medications.” I suggest that this is a system failure that has been compounded by physicians’ acquiescence in covering for their colleagues. A colleague’s patients do not become your responsibility, nor do you have a duty of care, until you agree to cover for this colleague. As a profession, we are already stretched very thin. When we almost unthinkingly agree to cover for a colleague during illness, we stretch ourselves even thinner. If there is a medicolegal consequence, we will be the ones who suffer, not the nursing home administrator, not the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care or its bureaucrats. As long as we agree to be stretched thinner, this will continue to be the case. Thus, we prevent the problem from becoming visible and expose ourselves to medicolegal risk. Perhaps it is time for us to look at the consequences of our collegial behaviour in covering for colleagues. When we agree to do this, we contribute to the underfunding and demise of our health care system and, at the same time, expose ourselves to increased medicolegal risk.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.011
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.072
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.036
Threshold uncertainty score0.089

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0110.072
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0160.010
Scholarly communication0.0090.013
Open science0.0020.005
Research integrity0.0340.034
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.088
GPT teacher head0.403
Teacher spread0.316 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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