It is most important that a doctor protects his integrity.

The society is aware that errors may not be avoidable.  One adverse outcome occurs in 10 hospital admissions.  Serious consequences occur once every 5 of these adverse outcomes.   Half of such events are not preventable.

On the other hand, the society demands integrity from highly respected members who are called professionals. It is the core value of a person, and a doctor must defend integrity in highest priority.  Any bleach is not accepted by society or his co-workers.  When such a bleach  is substantiated with a standard regulator, a negative verdict is likely.  In addition decision makers have major difficulty in determining how the deficiency may be repaired and when the doctor may be restored to his fraternity. 

To illustrate the difference between professional error and bleach of integrity, we look at an example.

A doctor A prescribed a wrong drug W to a patient who attended him regularly for the past 3 years.  His clinic assistant gave the drug to the patient already, but took trouble to ask Dr A again during tea break.

Dr A called back the patient and apologize to the patient, telling him carefully what happened and expressed his apology.  How an apology is appropriately made please refer to other pages in this blog.   The patient appreciated and kept attending Dr A, because he now knew that he did not need to worry about anything from Dr A, and trust was maintained.

A Dr B under the same circumstances hid up the incident without telling the patient, or offloaded blame to his nurse in front of the patient upon calling back for change of medication.  In either situation, Dr B bleached integrity expected of an intellect, and of course fell short of expectation from his professional conduct.  He would have been in extreme difficulty, if his patient or staff raised a complaint to his affiliated team(s), organization(s), standard regulator(s) or lay public.