When Safe Practice Makes You the "Difficult" Provider

When you draw a line and refuse to continue unsafe prescribing, you are doing the right thing. What happens next is that you become the least popular person in the building.

Patients who were trained by the previous provider to expect easy refills will be angry. Leadership, which quietly tolerated the risk for however long this was going on, will be annoyed that you are creating disruption. Colleagues will respond in ways that have more to do with their own practices and their own discomfort than with anything you are actually doing wrong. And people who cannot prescribe at all will tell you what you should be prescribing.

This is not a clinical problem. It is a cultural one. Here is how to hold the line through it.