Employment Screening - What Can Go Wrong When You Don’t Pre-Screen Employees

In healthcare, missing the minute details about an employee’s past can be devastating, both for the healthcare facility as well as the patients they care for. At some point in our lives, everyone is a consumer of the services provided by medical professionals and we put tremendous trust in them. We assume that they have a high level of competence and that they are upstanding citizens. However, the truth is that physicians and healthcare workers are regular people who make mistakes like the rest of us. When these actions involve criminal behavior, their right to continue providing medical care needs to be taken away. If employment screening and a criminal background check do not occur prior to hiring (and then continuing during their tenure), financial and physical harm can ensue.

Lawsuits are one consequence suffered by facilities that employ a medical practitioner without performing thorough employment screening. In the 1997 case involving Dr. Michael Swango, proper credentialing and criminal records were not adequately checked. This resulted in Dr. Swango being employed at multiple facilities across several states with a trail of dead patients left in his aftermath. Some of the hospitals that employed him had performed checks on his past, but the system is flawed because criminal information on doctors is not passed on from state to state. He was aware of this and simply moved from the state in which he was living to escape prosecution. The institutions that employed him were unable to uncover his prior conviction of poisoning co-workers which had resulted in 5 years of incarceration! What facilities can do to remedy this is to contact the medical board in each of the states the doctor has practiced in to see if any violations, prior prosecutions or complaints exist. Of course, this is assuming that the medical provider is honest about all of the areas where they have practiced.

Physical harm is the next consequence that can come to patients and employees when medical facilities fail to run a criminal background check or perform employment screening. Again, in the example of the Dr. Michael Swango case, grave physical harm came to patients who were put under his care. He was convicted for a total of 4 deaths, but the actual number of deaths that occurred mysteriously under his care is estimated at between 35 and 60 people (James B. Stewart (1999) Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder). This physician was found to have multiple suspicious and negligent actions dating back to his early days in medicine. So what went so wrong? First, medical schools and facilities that had employed him either didn’t investigate and report their suspicions or failed to check his prior places of employment.

In the field of medicine, people’s very lives depend on the capabilities of our doctors and caretakers as well as their dedication to the Hippocratic Oath; to do no harm. When they are negligent or criminal in their actions, they need to be discovered and promptly removed from their positions as providers. Employment screening and performing a criminal background check are both vital parts of verifying that a medical worker is both qualified and deserving of the great responsibility of caring for other human beings.