Doctor Files Bias Suit Over Losing Key King Hospital Job : Courts: Officials say Dr. William Shoemaker was reassigned because of problems in keeping accreditation.

Almost 30 years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. was leading his historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., the legendary civil rights leader needed medical attention.

A young white physician who had come from Chicago to join the protest was summoned to care for King. He was Dr. William Shoemaker, and although he rarely discusses the matter nowadays, his eyes still water at the recollection.

Shoemaker, 70, is an internationally renowned pioneer in the field of intensive care who has spent his life in teaching hospitals that serve the poor across the country.

But now he is now engaged in a civil rights struggle that he never envisioned. He is fighting to keep his job, a top post at the South-Central Los Angeles hospital that bears King’s name--the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. The legal shield he is using in an unusual lawsuit filed against the hospital is the Ku Klux Klan Act.

“I never dreamed that I would find myself, at this stage of my career, involved in a lawsuit to save my reputation and good name and resist what I believe to be fundamental unfairness and discrimination against me based upon my race and my age,” Shoemaker said in a court declaration.

After he was abruptly ordered to resign last month as chairman of the emergency department, Shoemaker filed a Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit charging that hospital officials acted out of racial and age bias as well as in retaliation for his apparent whistle-blowing. A hearing is scheduled today. Medical center officials denied the allegations and said Shoemaker was merely reassigned with no cut in his $164,000-a-year salary. They say they acted in response to an accrediting agency’s report that questioned Shoemaker’s credentials and found major deficiencies in the emergency department’s training program for resident doctors. Within the next few weeks, the agency will decide whether to revoke the program’s accreditation.

Dr. Reed Tuckson, president of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, said Shoemaker had to be reassigned because the accrediting agency is requiring that the emergency room chairman be a board-certified emergency specialist--and Shoemaker is not.

“I have spent my life fighting for human equality and I resent these allegations (of discrimination),” Tuckson said in an interview. “They are not only untrue, they are unfair.”

Shoemaker assumed the post in 1991 after a nationwide search for a permanent chairman of the emergency department, which had been without a leader for about nine years.

His recruitment was viewed as a coup for a hospital that had struggled to attract good doctors. Shoemaker’s resume is 36 pages long, listing about 400 articles in scholarly journals, as well as a leading textbook on critical care.

Shoemaker alleges that he was demoted without good cause from a post that he was entitled to hold for six years and that carried an extra stipend that has now been withdrawn.

The demand for Shoemaker’s resignation came Dec. 17.

Shoemaker contends in his lawsuit that the move was prompted in part by a perception within the hospital that he is a whistle-blower who had provided information to the district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles Times about the death of Deputy Sheriff Nelson Yamamoto. The rookie deputy died at the hospital in 1992 after surgery on gunshot wounds. The Times reported Nov. 15 that his death is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.

Tuckson said Shoemaker’s dismissal resulted exclusively from the November report by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education threatening to shut down the emergency department’s training program for 42 resident doctors, who provide the bulk of the patients’ care.

The agency criticized the hospital’s treatment facilities and supervision of residents by senior physicians. It noted that more than half of the 13 supervising doctors, including Shoemaker, are not certified as emergency specialists and that three of the certified doctors only work one shift per week supervising patient care.

The agency acknowledged that Shoemaker is an excellent surgeon but said he has limited experience in emergency medicine. Shoemaker disputed that, saying he has worked in emergency departments or interacted with them for 30 years in Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles.

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In hopes of saving the residency training program, county health services official Walter Gray said the hospital is hiring several physicians to bring the number of certified emergency specialists to 14. He also said a national search has been launched for a new chairman who must be an emergency specialist.

Meanwhile, the department will be run temporarily by a certified emergency specialist, Dr. H. Range Hutson, 44, who is in charge of the main admitting area of the emergency department at County-USC Medical Center. Hutson is a graduate of Stanford University and UC Davis School of Medicine.

Not all the emergency departments at teaching hospitals nationwide are headed by certified specialists in emergency medicine, which is a newer field than, for example, surgery or internal medicine.

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The largest emergency department in the country, at County-USC Medical Center, is headed by Dr. Gail Anderson, who is not a certified specialist. But he said he is viewed as having the equivalent qualifications, partly because he founded the department. He said his successor at County-USC will undoubtedly be certified as an emergency specialist.

Of Shoemaker, Anderson said: “I like him. I respect him. But it was a mistake” that the hospital named him emergency department chairman in 1991 because he is not an emergency medicine specialist. He said Shoemaker’s removal was appropriate.

Dr. Mohamed Parsa, director of the trauma center at Harlem Hospital in New York City, said there is “no question about Dr. Shoemaker’s abilities and qualifications . . . To be disgraced with this kind of dismissal after he’s given his life to humanity and to medicine is terrible.” Parsa described Shoemaker as an unusually truthful man who sometimes offends people with his honesty. “People gang up on him,” Parsa said, “so he has had to pick up and run” from one hospital to the next like a “scientific gypsy.”

Shoemaker said he has moved where opportunities present themselves, devoting most of his medical career to exploring new methods for boosting survival rates among acutely ill or injured patients. He joined the department of surgery at King in 1986 with the hopes of improving survival rates among patients with gunshot wounds and other severe trauma. He said he wants to stay at King to complete his work and energize the younger residents.

“I am fighting for my position because much more than a position is at stake--fundamental fairness, 48 years of work, and my good name, which is being destroyed,” Shoemaker said.

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In 1965, when he was setting up the first organized trauma center at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, he heard the news that marchers in Selma had been attacked by police dogs on “Bloody Sunday.” The doctor packed his bags and headed to Alabama with one of his sons, then 9 years old.

March organizers immediately selected Shoemaker as part of a doctor squad to be ready in case violence broke out. As it happened, there was no violence, but King needed minor medical attention. It was Shoemaker’s privilege, he recalled, to provide care. Afterward, he met and talked with King on many occasions.

“It breaks his heart to be filing a lawsuit against an institution named after Martin Luther King Jr.,” said Shoemaker’s attorney, Rees Lloyd. “But we both feel we’d be hypocrites if we didn’t.”