Doctor Under Inquiry Gets UCLA Fellowship Extension

Cardiac surgeon Jonah Odim, whose career has been jeopardized by a long-running inquest in Canada into the deaths of 12 children under his care in 1994, can continue studying and practicing at UCLA Medical Center, a medical committee at the hospital has ruled.

Odim is free to treat patients but for now is on a “research rotation” as part of his transplantation fellowship, a medical center spokesman said. The doctor had volunteered to quit treating patients several weeks ago when a reporter and others raised questions about his surgeries at a Manitoba hospital and his role in the 2 1/2-year inquest, which is the longest in Canada’s history.

“UCLA completed its internal investigation, and there is very little we can say legally,” spokesman David Langness said. “Dr. Odim was returned to full privileges as of last week.”

Langness added that when Odim applied for a one-year fellowship that expired last month, he had told the university “everything he needed to reveal” about his experience in Canada.

Reached at his UCLA office Tuesday, Odim declined to comment on the medical committee’s extension of his fellowship.

The decision is a positive development for Odim, whose promising career took a radical turn in Canada in 1994, when the surgery program he headed at the Variety Heart Centre in Winnipeg was abruptly suspended and pressure from the media and grieving parents led to the inquest. His career swerved off course again two years ago, while he was at Emory University in Atlanta, when medical authorities balked at extending his temporary license after learning of the Canadian probe.

The inquest’s purpose is not to point fingers at Odim or anyone else, but to discover why the children died and whether the program may have been fatally flawed, perhaps well before Odim’s arrival.

But some parents blame Odim and the hospital for the deaths, saying they were never told of the doctor’s relative inexperience as a chief surgeon.

Odim’s supporters blame health-care politics in Canada, a long-standing lack of financial support for the children’s heart program and a small population base that made it difficult to keep up the skills of medical professionals involved in the program.