Undertaking a career as a physician is a long and arduous road. By the time you graduate from medical school and match with a residency program, you've invested a lot of time, energy, and money into your career. After a lifetime of academic achievement, finding yourself faced with a corrective or disciplinary action can be overwhelming–but you don't have to go through it alone. The Lento Law Firm has the experience to help you navigate the process so that you can complete your residency and launch the successful medical career you've dreamed of.
A medical residency is a hybrid of graduate education and employment. Any resident facing penalties that could lead to suspension or dismissal needs to confer with a legal expert who is familiar with both employment law and student-discipline defense. Medical residency termination lawyer Joseph D. Lento has had years of experience in both areas–defending university employees facing administrative penalties, and advising students whose graduations are in jeopardy because of academic inadequacies or behavioral misconduct. He is often able to resolve the matter informally, through negotiation or mediation with program chairs or university administrators.
Dismissal From a Nevada Medical Residency
Residencies entail many grueling hours of work. Residents on duty often find themselves confronting stressful situations while maintaining an appearance of calm with patients and their loved ones. On top of this, residents are often required to attend lectures and seminars when they aren't on duty. Toss in personal issues, and it's no wonder that mental and physical pressures can lead to mistakes in judgment that cause residents to fall short in their performances–by failing to successfully complete an important part of their training, or perhaps by self-medicating with drugs or alcohol to the point that their work suffers–eventually resulting in dismissal. Medical residency lawyer Joseph Lento has spent years negotiating on behalf of students who were threatened with dismissal due to challenging personal circumstances.
ACGME Competencies
Before the Nevada State Medical Association will certify a resident as qualified to practice without supervision, the resident must master certain core competencies developed by the Accreditation Council For Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). ACGME Core Competencies measure a physician's ability to to diagnose and treat illness, to improve patient health and wellness, to offer advice and resources to prevent disease, and to provide both treatment and emotional support to patients and their families.
Each core competency consists of a series of milestones that residents must satisfactorily meet to prove their fitness to practice. Failure to successfully accomplish even a single milestone can jeopardize a resident's medical career. The specifics vary depending on the resident's specialty, but the general categories are:
- Practice-Based Learning and Improvement: Modern medical knowledge and treatments are continually evolving. A competent Nevada resident must demonstrate an ability to keep up with new information and techniques, and know how to apply them when making decisions.
- Patient Care and Procedural Skills: A resident must be able to incorporate knowledge and skills picked up in the classroom when evaluating patients and devising appropriate therapies.
- Systems-Based Practice: Health-care diagnoses and treatments do not operate in a vacuum. A Nevada resident must be knowledgeable about the entire health-care system and the various communities in which it operates, so as to utilize all available resources for optimal patient care.
- Medical Knowledge: A Nevada resident must demonstrate an ability to apply all the medical and scientific knowledge they've learned in class when carrying out patient diagnoses and treatments.
- Interpersonal and Communication Skills: Being a good doctor requires more than substantial medical knowledge. A Nevada resident must be able to listen attentively and communicate clearly with patients, families, peers, faculty and other members of the healthcare team.
- Professionalism: A Nevada resident's standard of conduct reflects on their medical school as well as on the entire medical community. Residents must always carry out their professional responsibilities ethically, using the highest standards of excellence and integrity.
Ethical Professional Behavior
Society places a great deal of trust in medical professionals. To maintain this trust, doctors are expected to observe higher standards of behavior than most other professions. Medical ethics rules cover a wide range of activities, ranging from romantic or sexual relations with patients, to appropriate treatment of newly deceased patients, to engaging in business relationships with pharmaceutical and biotechnical industries that might generate a conflict of interest. These standards apply to residents just as much as to experienced physicians.
Likewise, residents and physicians alike have an ethical duty to take care of their own mental, emotional, and physical health. Maintaining a regular workload while unwell can cloud a physician's judgment and may lead to serious errors in diagnosis and treatment, halting a resident's medical career when it has barely begun.
Successful completion of a medical residency is the culmination of years of work and study. No Nevada resident should risk losing it all because they didn't retain a knowledgeable advocate like medical residency lawyer Joseph Lento to help them prepare an effective defense.
The Lento Law Firm has assisted medical students and residents nationwide in dealing with discipline boards. Don't go through the process alone. Call the Lento Law Firm at 888-535-3686 to see how we can help.
