Technician Allegedly Did Surgery at County Hospital

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office filed misdemeanor criminal charges Wednesday against County-USC Medical Center and one of its former doctors, alleging that the surgeon left an operating room and allowed a “scrub technician” to perform sterilization surgery on a female patient.

The patient, a 23-year-old woman from Lakewood, was anesthetized last March when Dr. Armineh Tavitian left the surgical suite and entrusted the surgery to the technician, David Wengert, and a medical intern, according to interviews and complaints filed Wednesday.

Wengert, whose duties as a surgical technician were mostly limited to counting and sterilizing surgical instruments, made an incision into the patient, cut one of her Fallopian tubes and cauterized it, City Atty. James K. Hahn said. The intern, who was not charged, cut the other tube, Hahn said.

At the time, Tavitian, now 30, was a senior surgical resident at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital at County-USC.

Tavitian is in private practice and could not be reached for comment Wednesday. City attorneys said she also uses Aghajanian as her last name. Wengert, 35, who prosecutors said still works at County-USC, also could not be reached.

The patient was unharmed, but state medical investigators--and prosecutors--would never have known about the case had it not been for an anonymous tip, Hahn said. He described Wengert as “totally unqualified in surgical procedures,” especially such a potentially dangerous operation as the post-delivery tubal ligation that he allegedly helped perform March 30, 1995.

“Thank God nothing happened to this woman,” Hahn said. “But it really is a gross dereliction of duty and medical practice to allow unlicensed medical personnel to perform surgeries.

“Obviously, the question in everybody’s mind is, ‘Is this the first time something like this has happened, or is it just the first time we found out about it?’ ” Hahn said.

The medical center--the busiest and biggest public hospital in the nation--was charged with one count each of intentionally failing to report the suspension of a physician and of failing to check with the state medical board before renewing the doctor’s staff privileges. If convicted, the hospital faces as much as $11,200 in fines.

Hahn said he charged the hospital because he was particularly concerned that administrators suspended Tavitian for 28 days after the incident, but then allegedly failed to report it to the Medical Board of California, which he said is required by law. The state watchdog agency was established to protect the public from dangerous doctors.

County-USC administrators said they felt blindsided by the charges that they did not notify the proper authorities about the incident.

“I haven’t seen the charges or who or what they are charging. I don’t know what their motives are, but it’s just not true,” said the hospital’s chief of staff and medical director, Dr. Ronald Kaufman. “We’ll have our day in court, and I’m looking forward to that. This thing is just bizarre.”

Kaufman said the hospital did notify the medical board after the incident, but, due to the charges, he declined to comment more specifically. Asked whether a 28-day suspension was sufficient, Kaufman said: “I’ll stand behind what we did, when all the facts come out.”

Hahn said authorities learned about the incident only after Supervisor Gloria Molina’s office got a tip from an anonymous source and notified former county Department of Health Services director Robert Gates. Gates notified the district attorney’s office, which forwarded the information to the medical board, Hahn said.

“It looks like a situation where they are trying to sweep a problem under the rug,” Hahn said. “The reason the law is on the books is that we want to know what our doctors are doing and what is going on in our hospitals. . . . If it were not for the whistle-blower, we may never have known about this.”

Tavitian and Wengert were charged with one misdemeanor count each of practicing medicine without a license, practicing medicine without a license under conditions creating risk of great bodily harm and battery.

Each faces up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for the first charge, up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine for the second charge and up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine for the last count, said Deputy City Atty. Mark Lambert, a prosecutor in Hahn’s Consumer Protection Unit who is handling the case.

Tavitian and Wengert are set to be arraigned April 17 in Los Angeles Municipal Court. The hospital is scheduled for arraignment April 24.