Obstetrician’s Disciplinary Hearing Begins

A Santa Ana obstetrician accused of botching seven cases, including one in which a child suffered severe brain damage and another in which an infant died, should be disciplined for gross incompetence and plotting to hide her mistakes, a state attorney argued Monday.

“There is virtually no known area of competence for this physician,” Deputy Atty. Gen. M. Gayle Askren said of Dr. Farhat Khan at the opening of the doctor’s state disciplinary hearing.

Khan, who faces possible loss of her medical license, also has been accused by state licensing authorities of making mistakes that led to two women becoming infertile.

In four of the cases, the medical board alleges, she altered medical records, lied to patients or prepared false notes to conceal her errors.

“In creating false records and making false statements, [she was] sealing her own fate,” Askren said.

Outside the hearing, Khan, 49, denied the charges against her. Though she declined to address most of the charges against her specifically, she defended her record and her reputation in the Orange County medical community.

“I always try to take care of the patients based on my experience,” she said after describing a case in which she said she had saved a patient’s life. “I put all my effort to do my best.”

Khan, who has practiced in Orange County for 11 years, specifically denied accusations by a senior medical board investigator and a private attorney that one infant suffered brain damage in part because she left the hospital for a hair appointment while the child was in fetal distress.

“I was there 28 hours,” she said. “I never left the hospital.”

The child’s mother suffered liver failure, and the boy, Albert Sanchez, now 4, nearly suffocated. He is now living in an institution--blind, deaf and unable to feed himself.

Khan’s lawyer, Henry Fenton, described the Sanchez case as “extremely unusual,” arguing that Khan handled it “entirely correctly” despite its tragic outcome.

Askren, however, said the case was not isolated. He cited the instance of another infant who died seven days after birth, saying Khan did not respond fast enough to signs of fetal distress.

In two other cases, women ultimately were rendered infertile after Khan botched their surgeries, according to the state’s charges. In one of those, Khan allegedly removed the woman’s healthy left ovary and left inside the diseased right one.

The doctor also is accused of failing to recognize that she had cut too deep when making a vaginal incision, leaving a patient temporarily incontinent and forced to wear diapers for months. That Huntington Beach woman, the state’s first witness, testified Monday that she was “humiliated” by the experience and still suffers some physical symptoms.

Fenton said Khan has been unfairly targeted by the state.

The medical board has strung together a series of unrelated cases dating between 1989 and 1994 that do not make for a convincing pattern, he said.

“These cases, if you look at them, are all totally different,” Fenton said in his opening statement before Administrative Law Judge William F. Byrnes. He described his client as “a very conscientious, very good physician.”

There is no evidence of duplicity on Khan’s part, he said, acknowledging only one case in which she corrected a record she knew to be erroneous.

Fenton said outside the hearing that the state’s accusations stem from the zealousness of a “mad dog” investigator for the Medical Board of California. He said Khan has a high-risk practice in which she often is called in to handle emergencies, and that some of the cases she is accused of mishandling were not even her patients.

The state hearing is expected to last more than a month and to include testimony from at least 60 witnesses. Byrnes will make a recommendation on whether Khan should be disciplined. The final decision rests with the board.

Khan received her medical training in Pakistan and England and did her residency at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology.