Doctors Allege Ventura Hospital Endangers Patients

A lawsuit filed by doctors at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura claims patients have been endangered by administrators bent on increasing revenue and reducing the authority of physicians.

The suit is the latest development in a lengthy feud pitting physicians against the hospital’s administrator, Michael Bakst, and its board of trustees.

The doctors claim the administration has seized $250,000 of the medical staff’s funds, tried to rig a staff election, adopted an 18-page “code of conduct” to muzzle opponents, and illegally allowed physicians to practice at the hospital without the staff’s review.

“The preeminent message is that the medical staff has to be the entity that addresses quality-of-care issues in the hospital,” said Tom Curtis, a Pasadena attorney who filed the suit Thursday in Ventura County Superior Court on behalf of the medical staff.

Curtis said he will ask a judge for a temporary restraining order to keep physicians who have not been credentialed by the staff out of the hospital. No date has been set for a hearing, but Curtis said he hoped that one could be held next week.

“Only doctors can decide if someone possesses adequate experience and training,” he said. “Only doctors can determine whether the standard of care has been met. At this hospital, doctors have been precluded from doing these tasks.”

Peter Goldenring, an attorney for the hospital, called the charges “scurrilous accusations by anonymous physicians,” noting that none of the complaining doctors are identified by name in the suit. He said the suit was instigated by “a small group of extremists” and was designed to thwart mediation efforts that have made some progress.

Tensions have been high at the hospital for more than a year, with some doctors contending that Bakst has retaliated economically against some of his critics and bullied others into silence.

On the other hand, doctors who support the administration have characterized the internal discontent as more of a family squabble than a civil war.

The 37-page lawsuit focuses on a number of areas in which the dissident doctors allege that patient care has been compromised. For example, a group of longtime radiologists was dismissed and replaced with “an inadequate arrangement which fails to provide requisite 24-hour availability,” the suit charges.

“This change was made purely for economic gain of the hospital, and without regard to quality of care,” the suit states.

The suit also criticizes care at the Centers for Family Health, outpatient clinics for which the hospital allegedly hired an unqualified physician. And it claims that patients are placed at risk by a “highly questionable surgical procedure” in the hospital’s year-old Prostate Institute of America.

Goldenring, the hospital’s attorney, called the charges “ridiculous.”

“The allegations in the lawsuit about quality of care are just false,” he said. “The truth of the matter is that care at Community Memorial Hospital is the very best.”

Goldenring said the head of the Prostate Institute, Dr. Duke K. Bahn, has gained international esteem. According to Goldenring, the cryogenic procedure offered at the institute is just one of a number of treatments available -- not its “centerpiece,” as the lawsuit states.

“There are people who come to this facility from all over the world,” he said.