Means to Prevent Practitioner Malpractice
by Moderator on Oct.19, 2012, under Topics for discussion
Recent news reported a case of forensic practitioner malfeasance. A chemist at the Massachusetts State Crime Laboratory is alleged to have falsified drug tests and reported out fraudulent test results. While it is unclear how long this malpractice had been going on, or just how many cases were affected, it has placed all the employed chemists’ work in question, and also, obviously, jeopardized thousands of cases.
The chemist was arrested and will eventually be tried for her actions, though the question remains: how can these situations be avoided? What sort of quality assurance program could be adopted to prevent such acts, be they purposely planned of not?
Further Questions: Is the analyst alone at fault, or is the organization, under which the laboratory operates, to blame as well? What precautionary steps could a laboratory take to prevent such cases from occurring in the future?
October 20th, 2012 on 12:45 pm
It is unfortunate but there will always be someone in any field that takes the easy way to get through their work. In knowing that there should always be a system of checks and balances, especially in the field of forensic science where people’s lives hang in the balance.
Her blatantly fraudulent methods by which to make conclusions in her cases has obviously caused unending damage to those in her field and will not put everyone else under the microscope (no pun intended). As with any scandal or error we only move forward if we learn from these situations.
First I believe that not only is she at fault but also the organization she worked for. Her immediate supervisor should have noticed the speed with which she went through her caseload. The sheer number of cases she analyzed should have raised red flags, not just with her supervisor, but with all senior staff in the laboratory, or even with her co-workers. We all know that lab work takes times and careful attention, so to see someone literally blowing through cases it should have immediately caused some concern.
One solution to this problem would be to institute mandatory supervisory analysis. A more hands-on approach to supervision should be taken. Supervisors should be required to randomly stop into the lab to analyze the analysis taking place. They should be required to work with each technician through one case to ensure that proper procedures are being followed and to assess the time it takes to get through them. For example: If the identification of a certain toxin takes say 5 hours to positively identify, it would normally always take that long. Which means if they employee logs 3 toxin identifications in less than 15 hours it should raise a flag.
The problem is that we struggle between being efficient and get as many cases as possible knocked out but need to ensure that it does not sacrifice quality or usurp protocol to do so.