Complaint Review: Dr. Susan Scholey

When ethics fails, and the courts fail, and mercy fails, sometimes there is only one place where an organization off track will be sensitive, and that is the pocketbook.

A complaint has been filed with CalPERS, the body that provides hundreds of millions to Kaiser Permanente to take care of public employees. This complaint has two parts, one against CalPERS itself for not auditing Kaiser Permannete often and in depth; and, two, a reference to Susan Scholey as a poster child for the lack of patients' well being as a first priority.

CalPERS wasn't until recently aware that someone like Susan Scholey could harm a retiree as she is doing with Dr. Bernard, without suffering consequences from her own medical community.

She is going to serve as a lighting rod for CalPERS.

It will be interesting to see what the weak administrators at the South Sacramento facility have to say once auditors who aren't their own are facing them across the conference room table.

This  doctor, as well as her supervisors, have been reported to the Medical Board of California and the California Department of Managed Health Care.

The AMA is not likely to help, since that is the organization that  has purposely kept the numbers of doctors in the US in short supply in order to maintain their salaries, on average, $100,000 more than physicians anywhere else in the developed world. (For that price, our health care system is ranked well below any in Europe.)

Short of proof that Dr. Scholey et al have purposely killed several people, they will continue to practice medicine in California. Simply abandoning a few elderly patients to suffering won't come close to enough information for the Medical Board to act.

The medical community is very tight. It takes a cut and dried heinous crime for a license to be suspended or revoked in California.

The only way to approach justice in a case like Dr. Scholey's is to attempt to influence the court of public opinion.

Is the OP going to make against multiple DRs??? Report them to the AMA

Sorry about not being original. I thought I had covered that by using quotation marks, but evidently not.

I have therefore written an original piece which should appear above this response if it is approved.

Thanks for pointing out the laziness. It wasn't my intention, but then, maybe your are right.

  Why are these reports and responses about two different doctors so similar?

  Bethcharette :  In a reply to report #748789,about a different doctor,  you posted :

""Let me share with you a real experience I had with Kaiser Permanente that may shed some light on Dr. Midgley's behavior."

  Sound familiar?

   Both this post and #748789 look like hatchet jobs done by someone that is too lazy to bother being original.

I found the following material particularly valuable and accurate:

"Let me share with you a real experience I had with Kaiser Permanente that may shed some light on Dr. Scholey's behavior.

It is true that she could have been so much more proactive, and there is no excuse that she wasn't.

However, in my case, when I had a "Kaiser" problem, as soon as it was escalated any distance at all up the chain of command, I received a contact from an attorney ordering me not to contact anyone further at Kaiser to solve my problem.

In other words, the attorney wanted me not to contact the very people who had the power to solve the problem.

It sounds as though Dr. Scholey really didn't want to solve the problem. That is, she sounds like a person who is anti-patient. There are doctors like that. They hate their jobs. Doctors have a very high suicide rate because many of them have gotten trapped in a profession that, if they had it to do over again, they wouldn't choose. Those kinds of people either punish themselves or others or both.

But, back to my story: Lucky for me, I ignored the attorney. He kept threatening me, if I didn't stop trying to solve the problem, and I kept ignoring him.

Finally, I found a fellow working in the chain of command with a heart, and the problem was solved.

My point here is that I think a lot of the problems created at Kaiser Permanente are due to bad advice from lawyers.

They really don't want to solve the problems, especially if they are paid on a billable hour basis as this attorney mentioned above was. I know that because he worked for a private firm under contract with Kaiser.

That is what is called a HUGE conflict of interest.

So, in this case, as soon as Dr. Scholey refused to take care of the problem at her level, and as soon as the physicians above her failed in the same way, a contract attorney was consulted, and this whole situation was lost.

No longer was an amicable solution possible, since the attorney's advice would almost certainly have been to be silent and let the problem fester.

I can still remember this lawyer threatening me over and over again about not trying to solve the problem out of court. It was such an evil message, and I think we have lots of that in America.

I am a Japanese citizen, and have relatives in Japan. They were thinking about expanding their law schools a while back, and the reason that was defeated was that they didn't want to have lawyers ruining their culture as they do in the United States.

How many speeches I heard in Japan saying things like, "Do you want to be like the United States with greedy lawyers by the millions trying to stir up trouble." Of course, the people of Japan didn't want that. (By comparison, the US has one lawyer for every 265 citizens. Japan has one
lawyer for every 10, 000 citizens. And, every lawyer in American thinks he or she should be rich. What a mess lawyers have made of this Country. I' surprised we don't have a law about how to brush our teeth. But, wait, it is coming.)

So what I am saying is that Dr. Scholey probably had a chance to solve the problem early on, but, after a short while, Kaiser contract lawyers would have simply told everyone who had taken the Hippocratic Oath to shut off communication.

Of course, that's the worst possible advice. It just begs for more conflict when one side is being given terrible advice. But there it is. Failing to communicate with a person who is suffering is just asking for that person to become both very angry and very frustrated.

You want to take a shot at real evil, I can give you the name of the Firm representing Kaiser that, had I listened to them, we would probably still be in court. As it was, the problem was solved at the physician level, where it should have been all along."

It is so sad when a problem that was obvious for years comes to roost.

Doctors are not trained to be leaders. They are trained to be technicians.

Because of the position doctors are placed in, and the fear many of us have in our hearts when we see them, it is easy for us to jump to the conclusion that, because of the degrees on the wall, somewhere in there leadership or management training is included. It is not.

Thus, up and down large HMO's, we have  cadres of really amateurish people being awarded management offices, as if they know how to lead, how to manage.

And, when an amateur is in charge, amateurish products and services result.

In health care, that can be tragic.

In Susan Scholey's case, as the case of Drs Isaacs, Midgley and Pearl, they are not trained leaders. They are technicians playing at leadership.

As such, they need to be controlled by actual trained managers.

It is a myth that just anyone can manage people, an office, a company.

None of the people mentioned in this complaint would stand a chance in a private business in terms of being appointed as managers. They have spent their time looking at problems other than management problems, and, therefore, like Susan Scholey, blunder badly time after time when appointed to offices that require them to manage others.

In such cases, patient conflict, conflict with underlings, and most importantly, bad medicine results.

Dr. Susan Scholey had such great potential in med school.  And, still does. HOWEVER.......

As the number of women in American medicine grew, and the laws of the land not only protected them, but encouraged organizations to promote them quickly, many women physicians were promoted beyond their natural abilities.

When people are promoted over others for societal engineering reasons, rather than because of proven ability, there can be tragic results.

In Susan Scholey's case, all the immature longings that she never had to control because of her most favored societal position are coming to the surface.

This is not Susan's fault. It is the fault of all of us who didn't have the strength or power to push back on bad social policy, policy that over and over again advanced those who were either the "correct" gender or something else, much like the rich kid whose dad is the owner of the company.
No one seriously thinks that, on his own, he would have done as well. However, because of the time and where he is placed, he never has to worry about anything. No matter what, he has his trust fund.

In the case of a physician promoted because of gender ONLY to a supervisory position, those beneath her, on a select basis, will pay a price.

And, those above her, unless they have the willingness to oppose immaturity by underlings will also find themselves in trouble.

Such a female appointment may play well on paper, but pity the poor patient who opposes such a person in the slightest way. Pity the underling who opposes such a person in the slightest way.

And, pity the poor administrator who, himself untrained to deal with leadership, has nothing to offer but tacit support, as standards of care collapse around him.