Resolutions on Texas Medical Board reform and how State Representatives can participate constructively

Representative Geanie Morrison
Victoria, Texas


Dear Representative Morrison,

Thank you so much for seconding my resolution on Texas Medical Board reform.

Would you kindly tell me whom I should contact to serve on the Resolutions Committee for our county convention, if that would be possible?

I know that a precinct in Harris County also passed a Resolution about reforming the TMB, but have not yet received other feedback.

How might persons who are interested in TMB reform help their Representatives get appointed to serve on the House Committee on Public Health?

I appreciate your interest in medical board reform. I would like to meet with you in the District at your convenience to discuss some ways that the board should be reformed. It's quite simple, really, and should not require new legislation. Here are key points:

1. The House Committee on Public Health should exercise sufficient oversight. It has utterly failed.

2. Open government laws, Constitutional due process, and the Medical Practice Act should be respected and followed. They are not. The House Committee on Public Health should request Attorney General opinions as to the legality of medical board procedures. The Attorney General should be directed, if necessary, to enforce the law. There must be procedures that doctors can follow to insure that our rights are protected. All of this should receive the oversight of the doctor's personal elected Representative who should make the House Committee on Public Health fully aware of violations.

It should be clear that no new laws are needed to provide this oversight. That is how government is supposed to function, as you know.

3. As you know from my resolutions presented at the precinct convention, several doctors have conclusive evidence that Executive Director Mari Robinson has committed multiple state and federal crimes. We have observed this to be her pattern and practice. We have affidavit testimony and other evidence, including altered government documents, which we wish to present to the Travis County Grand Jury. We need to know the proper procedure.

Our presentation of evidence needs the oversight of the House Committee on Public Health.

4. Doctors presenting criminal evidence against Robinson need protection from retaliation.

5. The medical board must implement, as soon as possible, a voluntary procedure by which doctors (any Texas doctor) may review complaints against licensees as to their significance in the overall practice of medicine and the severity of an alleged violation of the Medical Practice Act. The board should streamline the way complaints are evaluated so that, again, as soon as possible, every Texas physician, as a condition for licensure, should review several complaints per year, unpaid, and receive Continuing Medical Education credit for his services. I recommend that the goal should be that a minimum of 10 primary care physicians would review each complaint for significance and potential for patient harm and that 5 physicians in the doctor's specialty should review each complaint as to whether a reasonable standard of care was followed, as well as potential for patient harm.

Every complaint should be evaluated for the opportunity to see if there is a process which, if changed, could improve the health of Texans.

I have evaluated newly published medical literature for many years for a Canadian medical school which feeds its results to Clinical Evidence.

Our work is sent out daily to clinicians all over the world. I have included a copy of the most recent update. As you can see, we rate every study as to its relevance to our discipline (I assume that all specialties are represented, but mine as you know, is primary care.) and newsworthiness to doctors in our discipline. I often notice that something, for example, in cardiology, might be big news for primary care physicians, but is hum-drum for cardiologists.

One of the benefits of participating in this international effort is that I am regularly notified of "Stellar Articles" which are both highly relevant and newsworthy. Having participated in such a worthwhile project for nearly 10 years makes me all the more ashamed of what the Texas Medical Board does to the people of Texas. I believe that the people of Texas have the opportunity to completely overhaul the medical board and cause it to become an agency which can show the country how a regulatory agency should behave. With a restructuring of priorities, we can make the "worst medical board in the country" of historical interest only.


Provided by the BMJ Evidence Centre, EvidenceUpdates service

Dear Dr. Pigott:

New articles: colleagues in your discipline have identified the following article(s) as being of interest:
Article Title Discipline Rele-
vance News-
worthiness
Development and validation of a case ascertainment tool for ankylosing spondylitis.
Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken) Rheumatology 5 5
Long-term outcome and prognostic factors of juvenile dermatomyositis: A multinational, multicenter study of 490 patients.
Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken) Rheumatology 6 6
Pediatrics (General) 6 6
Dermatology 6 5
Evidence for predictive validity of remission on long-term outcome in rheumatoid arthritis: A systematic review.
Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken) Rheumatology 6 5
Effect of hemodialysis before transplant surgery on renal allograft function--a pair of randomized controlled trials.
Transplantation Nephrology 6 6
Adenoidectomy for recurrent or chronic nasal symptoms in children.
Cochrane Database Syst Rev Pediatrics (General) 6 5
Regular treatment with formoterol and an inhaled corticosteroid versus regular treatment with salmeterol and an inhaled corticosteroid for chronic asthma: serious adverse events.
Cochrane Database Syst Rev Respirology/Pulmonology 6 6

Just click on the title to review the abstract and/or PubMed record.

Best wishes from EvidenceUpdates

* Note: if you are unable to access your alert by clicking on the article link, please login directly to EvidenceUpdates at http://plus.mcmaster.ca/EvidenceUpdates/ and access the article under 'My Alerts' which is listed in the top panel of the EvidenceUpdates system. If you continue to experience difficulties, please contact us for further assistance.

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Here is an example of a notification that I have an article to rate:

morehlp@mcmaster.ca
to me

show details 7/7/09

Dear Dr. Pigott,

You have an article to rate for McMaster PLUS, PIER, EvidenceUpdates, and the Evidence-Based Journals:
Discipline: Internal Medicine and its subspecialties
Title: The benefits of statins in people without established cardiovascular disease but with cardiovascular risk factors: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.
Article ID: 28393

NEW!! NB: The rating form now includes a Conflict of Interest statement. Answering YES to the question on the rating form in MORE will automatically remove this article from your rater's inbox. A NO answer will permit you to proceed with your ratings. Click here* to be automatically signed into the MORE system. Rating instructions are included below.

The full text article you review is protected by copyright and is for your viewing purposes only. Please do not download or distribute copies to others in any format...

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