Build Your Own Mayo Clinic ◾ 99
We the Practitioners
We can think of our commitment to clinical governance as our constitu-
tion itself. Our constitution establishes the rule of law. It defines us less as
to what we do as practitioners than it does as to who we are. It cannot only
serve as a way to accept some loss of power and autonomy; it must also
serve to elevate that inevitable loss of individual prerogative as serving an
exalted moral purpose, just as the US Constitution does for us as a nation.
The commitment to the rule of law contained in our clinical governance
provisions would be incomplete without the actual laws themselves. These
are our standards of care. While we have been very good at building laws
founded in specialty-care standards ...