Doctor death in Bundaberg.(Dr. Jayant Patel)(Biography)

BETWEEN 1978 AND 2005, in New York, Oregon and Australia, Dr Jayant Patel left a trail of the mutilated and the dead. How could this happen? Who protected this miscreant throughout his career and prevented his activities being exposed? Has the moral miasma of multiculturalism played a part in corrupting standards and confusing the issues?

Dr Jayant M. Patel--or "Doctor Death" as he was christened by the Australian anaesthetist who watched his patients die--was first discovered mangling patients fully twenty years ago in New York. Given employment in an Australian hospital in 2003, where he continued on his destructive path, he was until very recently the subject of an official governmental inquiry (the Bundaberg Hospital Commission of Inquiry, hereafter "the Inquiry"). This investigation involved a possible total of eighty-seven deaths, and in an interim report of June 10, 2005, the Commissioner recommended that Patel be charged with murder. Prosecution may be difficult, however, for with the active connivance of Queensland health administrators he fled back to America last April, and his present whereabouts are unclear.

Patel was born in 1950 in Janmagar, Gujarat, India, receiving his qualifications from the M.P. Shah Medical College in his hometown in 1973. While I haven't visited Jamnagar, I know the region and adjacent towns, and although a qualitative ranking of Indian medical schools is unavailable, I think we may say with some confidence that in 1973 the M.P. Shah Medical College did not rank very high. In 1977 Patel moved to the United States, training as a surgeon in Rochester and Buffalo between 1978 to 1984, meanwhile working as a resident trainee surgeon at a local hospital.

In 1984 New York health officials cited him for failing to properly examine patients before surgery (we find exactly the same thing later in Australia), fined him US$5000 for negligence, and placed him on three years' clinical probation. Just as important is the fact that the American report also charged Patel with "moral unfitness to practice" medicine under New York law. According to an article in the Oregonian on April 22 this year by Don Colburn and Susan Goldsmith it accused him of falsifying operating theatre reports, "abandoning or neglecting a patient in need of immediate professional care", and "harassing, abusing or intimidating patients either physically or verbally".

In 1989 he moved to Oregon and joined the Kaiser Permanente Hospital as a general surgeon in Portland. How did he find work at this hospital so easily? Colburn and Goldsmith show that in 1988, four years after Patel had been disciplined in New York for "negligence, incompetence, and unprofessional conduct", a prominent Rochester surgeon named J. Raymond Hinshaw (now deceased) wrote to the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners that Doctor Death showed "technical and professional brilliance". When asked for further detail Hinshaw responded with a strong defence of Patel's application for a post as surgeon: the proceedings against Patel, he claimed, consisted of the "harassment of a brilliant young surgeon", a man he would recommend "without reservation".

Over in Oregon, according to Kathleen Haley, Executive Director of the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners, his glowing New York references carried more weight than his dismissal from the residency program in 1981, or his $5000 fine; and they successfully nullified the New York disciplinary action for negligence, incompetence and unprofessional conduct. Another spokeswoman for the Oregon BME remembered uncomfortably that although the references were superb, she was aware of reports of deaths from Patel's operations, "likely resulting from his less than quality surgical skills".

These "less than quality surgical skills" would soon be displayed again. According to the useful Wikipedia entry it wasn't long before Patel's perverse enthusiasm for cutting and stitching human flesh was being noted at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Portland too: "Medical staff alleged that he would often turn up, even on his days off, and perform surgery on patients that were not even his responsibility. In some cases this surgery was not even required, and caused serious injuries or death to the patient."