Warning Signs Can Save Your Career
Warning signs can save your career … if you notice them in time.
There are three basic reasons clinicians miss warning signs: they don’t know what to look for; they don’t know where to look; and they fail to grasp the significance of what they see. It’s elementary, really.
A dermatologist can spot a suspicious mole on your face before you’ve taken off your coat because they know what to look for. The problem, of course, is that no one teaches dermatologists or any other practitioners what boundary violations look like as they evolve from innocuous “drifts” into career-ending transgressions.
The first stage is the hardest to spot. You daydream about dating a patient or imagine telling off a colleague who keeps bragging about their successes. Such woolgathering hurts no one and crosses no boundaries, which is why it is called a drift.
It’s not until you find yourself returning to the same thought over and over again or spinning your daydream into a more elaborate fantasy that you’re likely to realize there’s something more serious going on.
If you can’t stop thinking about something or someone, it’s time to stop and think.
When a purely private thought sparks public behavior, the danger of a violation increases dramatically. The action needn’t be dramatic. Anything out of the ordinary is reason for concern, especially if it recurs. If you keep ordering tests for a patient whose diagnosis is clear or calling them after hours to check on them, you need to ask yourself why you are behaving differently with that patient than you do with everyone else.
If you find yourself doing or saying something out of the ordinary, take a minute to stop and think.
Crossings are a sign of serious dangers ahead.
A crossing is far more serious than a drift because as the name suggests, it involves actually crossing a professional boundary. The only difference between a crossing and a violation is supposed to be that the former does not cause harm. In reality, you never really know if your action has hurt someone. Say you casually write a prescription for a friend or colleague without taking a history or making a note in their file. Unless you follow up, you simply don’t know whether there was an adverse reaction or other complication. If not, your action was a crossing. But what if your friend is later diagnosed with a serious ailment that went undetected because of your undocumented intervention? Not only are you guilty of a violation, you have also hurt your friend, interfered with their treatment, and seriously damaged your own career.
Any time you realize you have crossed a boundary, whether or not you think any harm was done or anyone complained, you owe it to your patients and yourself to stop and think how best to avoid repeating the mistake.
Stop and think whenever:
You can’t stop thinking about something or someone
You find yourself doing or saying something out of the ordinary
You realize you have crossed a boundary, whether or not you think any harm was done
You discover drifts or crossings clustering around a core issue
Someone mentions a concern about something you’ve said or done
You feel you have no time for anything
You think you don’t have to worry about boundary violations
*The above content was written by Professional Boundaries Inc. Their entire blog post can be found here: https://pbieducation.com/warning-signs/
If you find yourself at an ethical boundary, whether you're facing consequences or not (yet), Eric J Speck specializes in helping individuals navigate these situations and get their lives and careers back on track. Contact Eric J Speck for a free consult if you have any questions whatsoever.
