Staff Exposed Dismissal of Doctors’ Files : Investigation: Medical Board workers say they were angered that bosses had swept away backlog of complaints. The whistle-blowers are called ‘heroes.’

When top law enforcement officials at the Medical Board of California ordered the dismissal in 1990 of hundreds of complaints against doctors, it did not take long for word to spread throughout the agency.

The news, several investigators said Thursday, sent a wave of revulsion through the rank-and-file agents who saw themselves as the front-line defense against bad doctors in California.

“You have the public filing complaints and we’re destroying them. That’s asinine,” one said. “When you get into the situation where there is wholesale destruction of records, everybody knows that’s wrong.”

Fearing reprisals from top management if they spoke out, outraged investigators complained instead to their union and the University of San Diego’s Center for Public Interest Law, which serves as a private watchdog of state licensing boards. Both groups filed complaints with the Wilson Administration, which asked the California Highway Patrol to investigate.

The results of the investigation were made public Wednesday with the release of a critical report on the Medical Board, the state agency that polices and licenses California’s medical professionals. Among the investigation’s findings was the disclosure that hundreds of Medical Board cases had been improperly dismissed--and in many instances destroyed--in an apparent attempt to reduce a backlog that had prompted criticism from the Legislature.

Several investigators interviewed Thursday acknowledged that it was rank-and-file law enforcement personnel within the agency who had blown the whistle on what they considered the improper actions and poor management practices of their bosses.

“The investigators came to us back in 1991 complaining of the case dumping. In my opinion those people are heroes; they risked their jobs and their reputations by coming forward,” said Julianne D’Angelo, supervising attorney for the Center for Public Interest Law.

Three Medical Board investigators spoke with The Times on Thursday on the condition that they not be identified. They said dissatisfaction with management in the agency was rampant among employees, but the issue that caused many of them to take action was the unwarranted closing of the cases.

They said a three-person management team marched into several key offices in 1990 and began going though files. They said certain files were tagged, indicating that they should be closed and in some cases destroyed. Those that were targeted, they said, seemed to be the cases involving doctors free from previous complaints or patients who had not followed up to see if the board had pursued their complaints.

“You would see a stack of files two feet high on a supervisor’s desk one day and by the next hardly any would be left,” recalled one investigator. “People didn’t like the idea of this happening. They didn’t think it was right.”

Of particular concern, another investigator said, was the fact that the team was not accompanied by a physician. Without medical expertise, he said, it was believed that the team was not qualified to make a determination that certain cases should be closed.

Other investigators said they remembered thinking that the closing of the cases made a mockery of their profession. “It gives you a good feeling when you’ve done a good investigation and taken somebody out that is hurting patients,” said one. “And it kind of sticks in your throat when people come in and simply wipe out cases without any investigation.”

Charles Solt, labor representative for the California Assn. of Union Safety Employees, the union representing Medical Board investigators, decided to report the investigators’ accusations to James Conran, director of the Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees state licensing boards. He said Conran showed concern and promised to protect the investigators against reprisals if they would talk to the Highway Patrol.

The patrol began its inquiry using one investigator, but as evidence mounted it added two more, along with an attorney and a physician. The CHP was chosen to investigate because the attorney general represented the Medical Board and was considered to have a conflict of interest.

The final report touched not only on case dumping but on findings that some officials in the agency had misused state vehicles and submitted false travel claims and that one administrator had accepted gifts from physicians he was overseeing in a rehabilitation program.

After releasing the CHP report, the Medical Board’s new executive director, Dixon Arnett, announced a series of steps to beef up enforcement and improve the agency’s policies and procedures. At the same time, he said he was taking administrative action against the officials cited in the report for wrongdoing.