Crooked doctor

This is one of the crooked doctors I investigated almost ten years ago. This is a guy whose license was taken in the UK and he came to NJ, claiming he “forgot” to tell the state licensing board about his history. Happy to see him stripped of his license, disgusted that it took this long:

A doctor who fled to the US from Britain after being convicted of manslaughter has again been banned from practising and fined almost $500,000, for injuring patients with surgeries he was not qualified to perform.

Dr Richard Kaul was stripped of his American licence at a meeting of New Jersey’s board of medical examiners, which also ordered him to pay $300,000 in civil penalties and $175,422 to reimburse the state for legal fees and investigation costs.

John Hoffman, the acting New Jersey attorney general, said the board’s decision would protect the public “from someone who put patients in harm’s way, and quite candidly had no qualms or remorse about repeatedly doing so”.

“Dr Kaul’s patients in fact did sustain additional maladies as well as uncorrected medical conditions, as a direct result of Dr Kaul’s improper procedures,” Hoffman said in a statement after the verdict, which confirmed a three-month professional prosecution of Kaul last year.

Kaul, 49, became a multimillionaire after arriving in the US and reinventing himself as a pioneering keyhole spine surgeon, despite his only hands-on training being a two-week course in South Korea. He made errors that left several patients unable to walk or work.

He had been told by a London judge in 2001 that his career was “in ruins” when he was found guilty of causing the death of Isatu Bangura, who suffered a cardiac arrest after he injected her with sedatives and failed to monitor her condition while she had dental work done.

New Jersey state prosecutors argued that Kaul had performed complex surgery with “flagrant disregard” for his inadequate qualifications, citing the cases of 11 patients who claimed to have suffered mistreatment at his hands between 2005 and 2012.

Judge Howard Solomon agreed in his decision in December that Kaul “never should have performed any spinal surgeries”, and had engaged in “gross negligence, gross malpractice and gross incompetence” by operating on people “without sufficient training, skills and competence”.

The case raised fresh concerns about the safety of ambulatory surgical centres (ASCs) like Kaul’s, which offer quicker and less expensive operations than traditional hospitals but are not subject to the same inspections and checks, and have been criticised by patient watchdogs.

In 2012 New Jersey governor Chris Christie vetoed a bill passed by state legislators that would have ensured all ASCs were regulated, partly on the grounds that it would cost too much for his administration to inspect them.