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. 2016 Feb 3;11(2):e0147800.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147800. eCollection 2016.

Cross-Sectional Analysis of the 1039 U.S. Physicians Reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank for Sexual Misconduct, 2003-2013

Azza AbuDagga  1 , Sidney M Wolfe  1 , Michael Carome  1 , Robert E Oshel  2
Affiliations

Cross-Sectional Analysis of the 1039 U.S. Physicians Reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank for Sexual Misconduct, 2003-2013

Azza AbuDagga et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Background: Little information exists on U.S. physicians who have been disciplined with licensure or restriction-of-clinical-privileges actions or have had malpractice payments because of sexual misconduct. Our objectives were to: (1) determine the number of these physicians and compare their age groups' distribution with that of the general U.S. physician population; (2) compare the type of disciplinary actions taken against these physicians with actions taken against physicians disciplined for other offenses; (3) compare the characteristics and type of injury among victims of these physicians with those of victims in reports for physicians with other offenses in malpractice-payment reports; and (4) determine the percentages of physicians with clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment reports due to sexual misconduct who were not disciplined by medical boards.

Methods and results: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of physician reports submitted to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) from January 1, 2003, through September 30, 2013. A total of 1039 physicians had ≥ 1 sexual-misconduct-related reports. The majority (75.6%) had only licensure reports, and 90.1% were 40 or older. For victims in malpractice-payment reports, 87.4% were female, and "emotional injury only" was the predominant type of injury. We found a higher percentage of serious licensure actions and clinical-privileges revocations in sexual-misconduct-related reports than in reports for other offenses (89.0% vs 68.1%, P = < .001, and 29.3% vs 18.8%, P = .002, respectively). Seventy percent of the physicians with a clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment report due to sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this problem.

Conclusions: A small number of physicians were reported to the NPDB because of sexual misconduct. It is concerning that a majority of the physicians with a clinical-privileges action or malpractice-payment report due to sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this unethical behavior.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: All authors have read the journal’s policy, and the authors of this manuscript have no financial competing interests. AA, SMW, and MC are employees of Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that has long worked on issues related to medical board oversight and physician accountability. Thus, these authors may be seen to have an intellectual competing interest. REO has no competing interests and received no compensation from Public Citizen for work on this paper, but he would like to disclose that he was Associate Director for Research and Dispute of the Data Banks before his retirement in 2008. In that capacity he designed the public-use NPDB file used in this study.

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