Environmental Due Diligence Lessons from Medical Malpractice Cases

The September 28th issue of the Wall Street Journal had an interesting on the leading causes medical malpractice claims and how diagnosing these claims can help avoid future mistakes. The article has some interesting statistics that are I believe are transferable to EPs.

40% of the medical malpractices cases were due to diagnostic error. Of this total, 79% of  errors were due to a failure of judgment, 59% were attributable to failure of vigilance or memory and 48% were due to improper knowledge. Another leading cause of disagnostic errors was patient behavior at 46% (the amounts exceed 100% because errors can have multiple causes).

How does this apply to phase 1 reports? The ASTM E1527 is a performance-based approach that relies heavily on the environmental professional exercising its professional judgment. This might be a good approach when the bulk of EPs are highly trained individuals with extensive experience. However, this premise or approach is undermined when the commodity shops use independent "inspectors" who use fill-in-the blank template reports and do not have the experience or the training to exercise the kind of professional judgment that many environmental conditions require.

Environmental issues involve complex issues where the equivalent of a drop of a chemical in a pool can lead to unacceptable human health exposures. Yet the industry continues to be dominated by ill-prepared and undertrained persons-many of whom I would not trust to buy me coffee at Starbucks.

Of course, this leads use to the other big cause for malpractice actions-patient behavior. In the medical field, patients may not seek care in a timely manner, fail to show up for tests or follow instructions such as fasting before having blood work. In the environment field, the analogy is clients who only want to pay for $700 phase 1 reports,  want EPs to make RECs “go away” or refuse to follow recommendations.

When I can, I steer clients to environmental consulting firms with employees whose professional judgment I trust. These firms usually have robust in-house training programs and stringent hiring standards. They may cost more than the commodity shops but I tell the client that they will pay less in the end since I wont have to spend unnecessary time fixing the flaws of substandard reports and they will get good advice on how to pro-actively address issues in a cost-effective manner.