City Weekly now has put together a searchable database of discipline files for doctors and surgeons in Utah. We hope this service can provide consumers with a tool to checkup on their doctors.---

This week’s cover story examined the difficulties state government has regulating doctors for bad practice. Now, using the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing’s own discipline newsletter, City Weekly has created a database that allows you to check out Utah doctors who were disciplined for conduct ranging from incompetence, drug abuse to sexual harassment, going back the last 10 years.

Previously, consumers would have to look up their doctor on DOPL’s website--if they were aware of it--and verify the license through a separate tool also on DOPL's Website. That tool informs the consumer if there is discipline record on file. If there is, you would need to file a request for the documents with DOPL and pay $12 to find any details out about that discipline.

If you didn’t want to pay for the file, you could do what we did—comb through 10 years of archived discipline newsletters and search out all possible references to the doctor you are curious about. And now that we’ve done all that work for you, you can simply search our database compiled from DOPL’s own newsletters at Cityweekly.net/doctors.

The database will be updated monthly at City Weekly, to make note of new discipline records or to note if doctors currently on probation or under restrictions have had privileges reinstated.