Polite Dissent

For most of my time in the Air Force, I worked at the Mike O’Callaghan Federal Hospital Family Practice Clinic. Our clinic was divided into ten “teams” of two providers: a physician and a physician’s assistant. Each team also had two nurses, four medical assistants and a receptionist. The system worked well and each team had a great deal of autonomy.

One day, our receptionist fielded an angry phone call from a bank downtown. They demanded to know why we had excused a particular patient from work for two weeks. Well, we hadn’t. She had never been seen in our clinic — ever. Apparently someone had stolen a stack of our work excuse notes and handed them out.

Doug, the physician’s assistant, was livid. As far as he was concerned, his reputation was on the line because it was his name that was “signed” on the bottom of the forged note. He spent all morning trying to figure out who had stolen the notes. Unfortunately, we never did find out who stole the notes so to this day Doug’s thirst for vengeance remains unquenched.

We started keeping the forms under lock and key after that. We also added a line that said not valid unless signed and stamped (military physicians have an ink stamp they use for official forms). We never had problems again, so it seems our changes worked.

Of course, the work notes we used in our office were just something I had put together quickly in Microsoft Word, so anyone could create a realistic looking note on their own in seconds without having to resort to outright theft