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Ask the expert: Are locum tenens physicians accountable for proving competency no matter how short their term?

Medical Staff Leader Connection, July 29, 2009

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Joint Commission standards require that organizations have plans for evaluating the competency of practitioners who are granted clinical privileges. Organizations should use the same methodologies to determine competency, such as focused professional practice evaluations and ongoing professional practice evaluations, as they do for other practitioners granted privileges.

Additionally, organizations should tailor the monitoring methods as appropriate to the locums’ time at the facility and their particular specialty. This may negate the use of direct observation for these individuals due to their limited time spent providing patient care in the organization. The situation may lend itself to using retrospective chart review, the results of which would also help determine whether the organization would want that practitioner to return to their facility.

As challenging as this may seem, medical staffs can tailor existing requirements to fit this unique population. For example, they can solicit more references for locum tenens than other practitioners and initiate chart review once the locum tenens begins working in the organization.

This weeks’ tip is excerpted from Assessing the Competency of Low-Volume Practitioners: Tools and Strategies for OPPE and FPPE Compliance by Mark A. Smith, MD, MBA, CMSL and Sally Pelletier, CPMSM, CPCS.

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