´Speak No Evil´ is a Risky Policy for Avoiding Litigation

Originally published December 5, 2005

Hospitals, like all other employers, seek to avoid litigation and contentious disputes with their former employees. Many of them use a seemingly innocuous litigation-avoidance technique: refusing to answer substantive questions about a former employee when a prospective employer conducts a reference check. The standard response--widely adopted after a few large jury verdicts against employers who provided adverse reference information in the 1980s--is that "We only confirm dates of employment and position held." But hospitals should take note: Dodging this risk only creates another.

Hospitals, after all, are not making parts for a telephone or widgets in an assembly line. When hospitals refuse to provide substantive answers in response to a reference check by a prospective employer of a former employee who had been involved in patient care, they are making it harder for the prospective employer to make an intelligent decision about whether the