Sunnybrook Hospital Doctor "Hans Kreder and his Complicity with Torture and Torturers"

Medical Disorder, Part 1

Bad doctors who cross the border can hide their dirty secrets. We dug them up

An unprecedented Star investigation reveals how doctors criss-cross the Canada-U.S. border while a broken system keeps secret the records of their crimes, malpractice and disciplinary rulings.

By Diana Zlomislic, Rachel Mendleson, Robert Cribb and Marco Chown Oved

Data Analysis by Andrew Bailey

                                                                                                                 

Doctors cut, burn, and torture the sick, and then demand of them an undeserved fee for such services. - Heraclitus

Doctors crossing borders                                                                                                These figures likely represent a fraction the actual number of doctors who've practiced both in Canada and the U.S. Compiled by the Canadian Institute for Health Information based on changes to mailing addresses of active physicians since the 1990s.

Sixty-four medical regulators in Canada and the U.S. oversee nearly one million medical doctors. Their common mission is to protect the public. They each have their own policies, laws and languages that shape how this is done.

Some regulators say they have a full picture of the disciplinary, criminal and malpractice histories of these mobile doctors — everything they need to protect patients.

“The process is as seamless as it can be,” said Dan Faulkner, interim registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO).

But how much of that information is made public is another matter.

 

Dan Faulkner, interim registrar for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, said a national registry is “a great policy idea,” but is not a priority. Anne-Marie Jackson/Toronto Star

“As a member of the public, I’d love to press a button and get all of this information available to me. But we have laws that are different in every province and jurisdiction,” Faulkner said. “We’ve made some very careful decisions about how we’re going to provide credible and relevant high-quality information to the public.”

A Toronto Star investigation reveals that Canadian medical watchdogs keep secret the vast majority of cross-border doctors’ disciplinary histories.

The Star spent 18 months reviewing thousands of pages of doctors’ public disciplinary records to verify those who have been licensed to work on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. We used these records, as well as interviews with physicians and regulators, to create the first comprehensive database that follows disciplined doctors — 159 of them — throughout their careers across state, provincial and country lines.

The Star’s analyses of these records show that almost half of the 159 doctors who were found guilty of professional misconduct in one place went on to commit a second violation that resulted in discipline. We found that 90 per cent of these doctors’ public profiles in Canada failed to report the breadth of sanctions taken against them.

The range of offences captured in the Star’s database includes: incompetence, 

improper prescribing, sexual misconduct, substance abuse and fraud. Nearly all of the disciplined doctors we identified are male and more than half are Canadian-educated.

In 45 cases, these are doctors — including Konasiewicz and Lemire — who have been disciplined in the U.S. and who currently hold an active Canadian licence. Thirty-four of 159 doctors we examined had criminal records: 13 of them were convicted in the United States and later kept or were granted a Canadian medical licence.