Doctor Who Didn’t Admit Patient Given Year Probation

A former emergency room doctor at Panorama Community Hospital has been placed on one-year professional probation by a California Medical Board panel for allowing a critically ill man to go to a county hospital after his family said they could not afford treatment.

The four-member panel found Dr. Stephen C. Acosta, 39, of Redondo Beach grossly negligent for not admitting 67-year-old Felix Talag to the hospital on April 11, 1987, even though the patient had vomited blood and his vital signs were unstable.

But the panel placed the doctor on probation, among the least serious of the sanctions the board could have used to discipline him, rather than revoke or suspend his medical license, board officials said.

“This will have very little effect on his practice,” Acosta’s attorney, John D. Harwell, said.

Acosta determined that Talag was suffering from “an acute episode of gastrointestinal bleeding” but gave the man’s niece directions to the county’s Olive View Medical Center rather than admit him after the niece said she would be unable to pay the private hospital’s bills, according to testimony at a three-day medical board hearing last month.

The panel, in its May 8 decision, absolved Acosta of allegations of incompetence and unprofessional conduct, accusations that, if upheld, could have cost the doctor his medical license.

“His conduct was extremely careless, but not morally unethical or corrupt,” the panel’s decision stated.

Talag recovered after he was treated for five days at Olive View.

The decision allows Acosta to continue practicing medicine at his Torrance office provided that he submits quarterly reports on his conduct to the medical board and makes himself available for interviews with a board consultant, among other conditions.

The medical board, represented by the state attorney general’s office, accused the doctor last May of illegally “dumping” Talag because the patient couldn’t afford treatment.

But based partly on the testimony of Talag’s niece, the panel determined that the decision not to admit Talag resulted from Acosta’s effort to accommodate the family’s desire for affordable care rather than a deliberate effort to dump the patient.

The panel said Acosta’s conduct “was an isolated event not likely to recur.”

In December, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office charged a nurse at Panorama Community Hospital with denying care to a critically ill baby girl, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is conducting its own investigation into alleged dumping at the hospital.