01/10/2024    Judd Davis, DPM,

Hospital Working Against Podiatry (Lloyd Bardfeld, DPM)

Discrimination is still rampant against
podiatrists and will continue to be that way as
long as we allow it, and in my opinion as long as
we have DPM behind our names instead of MD or DO.
In my city, the same thing happened over ten years
ago. Taking call without pay was forced upon the
podiatrists at the city hospital which has a
tremendous amount of uninsured, indigent, pro bono
care. The hospital decided to pay all specialties
for call there, EXCEPT podiatry, due to the
tremendous burden, but would not let us out of our
call obligation. Talk about discriminating! This
led to an expensive lawsuit and ended with most
podiatrists resigning privileges at the hospital.
The hospital went over a year without any
podiatrist and their amputation rate skyrocketed
to the point they were forced to hire 2
podiatrists to take on all those cases they were
making us do for free.

Now ten years later, the exact same thing is
happening at the only other hospital system in the
city. They are forcing us to take call without pay
and we are burdened with most all the homeless
frostbite cases in the city, uninsured diabetic
foot infections... It has gotten so bad that they
are transferring patients here from other
hospitals in the state that don't have podiatry
and forcing us to take all this. BTW, they pay
orthopedics quite well to be on call, but ortho
wants nothing to do with these kinds of cases so
they dump them on us. So far, they have ignored
our requests to discuss with administration for
almost a year.

My advice would be to band together with all the
other podiatrists on staff at that hospital and
have a meeting with the hospital admin. If that
gets nowhere, then all DPMs resign at the hospital
and they will have no choice but to hire a
podiatrist to take those cases. Hospitals really
value podiatry once they don't have them on staff.
If you go legal, be prepared for a very long,
expensive, stressful lawsuit. As someone else on
here said, "You just keep getting more of what you
tolerate."

Judd Davis, DPM, Colorado Springs, CO

There are no more messages in this thread.