Docs who gave up narcotics licenses still not in NPDB
Docs who gave up narcotics licenses still not in NPDB
A new report says that almost 2,600 doctors who have voluntarily surrendered their federal narcotics-prescribing licenses over the past 11 years have not been reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). The report was released recently by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Sidney M. Wolfe, MD, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, urged the Department of Justice to make good on a 4-year-old promise to provide the NPDB with such information. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is supposed to report the physicians to the data bank.
"We urge you to immediately order the DEA to provide the NPDB with all the information on these physicians," Wolfe wrote in a recent letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft. "This is a matter of extreme urgency since every day that goes by with the NPDB failing to include information about these 2,592 doctors is a day when people making the thousands of daily inquiries of the NPDB are being misled by the absence of information concerning serious offenses by doctors."
Physicians who voluntarily surrender their DEA narcotic-prescribing licenses "do so only because of impending revocation, after having been found to have violated the federal Controlled Substances Act or to have engaged in other unacceptable medical practices."
Public Citizen compared information in NPDB’s public use files (in which the names of physicians are deleted) with DEA actions listed in Public Citizen’s "20,125 Questionable Doctors" database. Wolfe says there was not one report in the NPDB of a physician who surrendered his or her DEA license from Sept. 1, 1990 through Dec. 31, 1999.
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