Before my traveling days I enjoy the daily grind in preop and OR at my local surgery center. Come in bright and early, get out early if the schedules light. Administration is always recruiting new surgeons to get more volume, and they recruit a new Transplant/Ophthalmologist, Dr. S. She is introduced to the departments, and standing orders are made for her upcoming cases.
Her first day she walks into preop looking lost, I offer assistance to locate her patients and what bay number they were in. What I found to be incredibly odd was she was keeping an apple air pod in one of her ears. I wondered if this was the new generation of doctor patters to go speak to the patients with an air pod in and leave the patient to wonder if they are even listening. She marks her patients, and they begin to go back to the operating room.
Cases seem to be taking incredibly long from my experience of cataracts and other eye cases. I just figure it’s her being new. Weeks go by, and it’s the same pattern. Cases go back, seems to be incredibly slow, but on this particular Wednesday she has a “fallout” in the OR. Administrators are scrambling to get another ophthalmologist in the OR to finish the case she left. I am being told that she “got sick” and left. With a patient under the microscope, administrators convince another ophthalmologist working to finish her case. Dr. G scrubs in and says, “what has happened in here”. This surgeon struggles to patch work the rest of the case and is obviously upset that his name is now on this chart of what I interpret is a surgical failure.
Another week goes by, and circulators are beginning to complain about being in her room. Reporting that what she is doing doesn’t appear to be standard, and they prefer to not have their names on her charts. Reports are coming in through infection control that issues are beginning to pile up from that end as well. Staff is really feeling morally torn to even participate in these cases anymore.
I am a very blunt person, so approach my director of nursing and ask what get be done regarding the issues with this doctor. I am told that it is a very delicate and complex situation because of her being new, as well as the liability of reporting her to the licensing board. They were going to address this with the medical chair for Ophthalmology at the centers next board meeting. I feel some comfort in knowing that they are going to try to do something about this terrible surgeon.
The next week I am in preop and a very old frail lady arrives to register for her eye procedure. I verify her name and date of birth, and notice this was her second visit with us. I confirm second visit, and she reports “well it’s the fifth visit for this eye”. Seeing that it is a Dr. S patient, my heart drops. I inquire about where else she had been. She reports going to three other facilities around town for her eye. I wanted to just sneak her out to the waiting room and tell her to RUN. I finished getting her ready and felt a level of doom that I hated, and off she went with her eye in the trusting hands of a surgeon that is trash. I later heard she lost her eye.
I reported to my administrator that Dr. S was now taking her patients to multiple facilities around town to avoid tracking all the issues. My director writes down my concerns and agrees she will follow up on this information. Going home that night with a sense of dread that I am perpetuating a system that is allow a doctor to hurt people, by being gagged into silence because that is the culture.
The day had come to have the board of directors’ meetings, and the Ophthalmologist made the decision to put a recording device on her microscope so he could review her cases. Once Dr S was notified of the decision regarding her surgical review, she left. I heard she moved to California, but not sure. Learned a hard lesson through this experience. Nobody wants to go after the bad doctors, until the lawsuit expense outweighs the risk of a contract payout.
People truly put so much faith in surgeons and doctors, and while there are great ones out there, there are also one that seemingly have the book smarts, but not the skills to physically make successful cases. People hear these stories and ask me “why didn’t you do anything?”. Truth be told, there really is nothing you can do. I can’t tell these patients to run; I can’t tell them the history of the patients with bad outcomes. I wish there was a database for patients to see tracked outcomes of surgical procedures, otherwise patients are left uninformed, and potentially blind. Pun intended.