Revolutionize Healthcare

What is Institutionalized Scope Creep?

Institutionalized scope creep (ISC) is a dangerous phenomenon plaguing our nation’s healthcare industry and harming vulnerable consumers. ISC exist when corporations endorse healthcare systems that strategically utilize board approved policies specifically designed to prioritize profit over patient safety and quality of care. These types of administrative policies subsequently ignore, permit, or encourage departmental/unit schematics and clinical practices that incentivizes a high pressure and hostile work environment to increase productivity per capita justifying an unnecessarily tight operational budget, therefore increasing corporate profit. One example of this is a hospital that permits unsafe staffing ratios of RNs to number of patients required to care for.  

Consequently, the culture within the institution tolerates, allows, complies with, or pushes the “Normalization of Deviance”, such as pushing practitioners to perform clinical duties outside of their scope of practice deviating from the established standard of care without proper extended scope training, certification, and documented supervised experience implementing the extend scope skill. It is less expensive for the institution to covertly push the envelope just a few skills over the scope of each practitioner on several levels to squeeze all the blood money from the proverbial stone. The stone of course, is the eventually burnt out, uninspired, and apathetic healthcare provider that has been taken advantage of for an entire career. This phenomenon is a major driver in the prevalence of addiction, mental illness, and suicides among healthcare providers. 

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Practicing outside of one’s scope often results in a cascade of subsequent malpractice. 

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Healthcare systems that fail to proactively establish and maintain an administrative framework to prevent scope creep has engaged in institutionalized scope creep and should be held accountable, proportionally liable for the inevitable medical malpractice, ruined careers, patient injuries, and deaths.

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We are collecting stories or examples of ISC to analyse and evaluate in an up coming book. If you have an interesting case or situation you have observed and would like to share your story, consider filling out our below form.