TORONTO, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- Public health advocates in Canada said it is "ridiculously naive" for physicians and health professionals not to get background checks like police officers do.
"People take it for granted that it's being done behind the scenes, that everybody has done all the checks they could do," Sharon Shore, a patient advocate and lawyer in Toronto, said in a statement. "Given that physicians literally have our lives in their hands, to require a criminal background check really is a 'no brainer.'"
However, provincial medical licensing bodies are not sure the administrative costs of such screening programs outweigh potential benefits.
The article, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, said licensing bodies believe physicians are unlikely to lie about having a criminal record and argue it's improbable that dishonest doctors could elude the scrutiny of regulators.
"People don't self-disclose things that harm their own interests," Shore observed. "Yes, 99 percent of physicians or healthcare professionals who have nothing that they need to disclose because they have no criminal background or no questionable background are honest. But it's the very people (who are not honest) that you need to catch."
Dr. Sholom Glouberman, founding president of the Patients' Association of Canada, said in the past it might have been enough to take physicians at their word because they had a more continuous relationship with their patients and communities, but today medical practice is becoming less and less continuous and more episodic.