One plaintiff says she witnessed Dr. Louis Kwong sticking his finger in surgical hip wounds on an unconscious patient while making sexual sounds and saying he was \u201cfinding the G-spot.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three leading female physicians at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, filed suit last week against\u00a0Los Angeles County, the overseer of the giant teaching hospital, contending that its management ignored years of complaints alleging sexual harassment, retaliation and discriminatory behavior by Dr. Louis Kwong, who until recently was the head of the facility\u2019s orthopedics department.
Kwong\u2019s activities created a toxic work environment and put patients at risk, the physicians said in their suits,\u00a0contending in one that he\u00a0committed sexual misconduct on unconscious patients in the operating room,\u00a0delayed acute surgery for county residents to perform elective procedures and once demanded that an operating room television on which a patient\u2019s operation was being monitored be switched to a baseball game he wanted to watch during the operation. They say he also wore a gun at the hospital, including in the operating room; Kwong is a volunteer deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County, the county confirmed.
Misogyny permeated\u00a0the facility, according to the suits.\u00a0One doctor said she was asked to step down from her position to make way for a younger, less experienced male applicant. The department needed to give \u201ca talented guy a chance before you turn into a pumpkin,\u201d her lawsuit says she was told.
The plaintiffs are Drs. Haleh Badkoobehi and Jennifer Hsu \u2014 who are orthopedic surgeons \u2014 and Dr. Madonna Fernandez-Frackelton, a former longtime program director of emergency medicine at the facility. In their lawsuits, they say that they were demoted or otherwise retaliated against when they complained about Kwong\u2019s behavior and that hospital administrators ignored written and verbal complaints about him for years.
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center is a level\u00a01 trauma center in Torrance with 576 beds that serves a largely middle- and lower-income population. Los Angeles County\u2019s Department of Health Services operates the hospital, which has a highly ranked residency program affiliated with UCLA Medical School.
The lawsuits involving Harbor-UCLA Medical Center follow other incidents at health care facilities affiliated with prestigious universities where complaints about doctors were allegedly dismissed for years.
Before they sued, all three physicians tried other remedies over many years, according to their suits, including filing grievances with the county and complaining to superiors. They say that the problems persist and in one of the actions say that they are suing to \u201chelp create a safer and more tolerant atmosphere\u201d at the facility \u201cfor future patients, women and other targeted groups.\u201d
\u201cThey rely on us being too ashamed and terrified for our careers to come forward,\u201d Badkoobehi said in an interview.
Kwong was placed on administrative leave in March 2022, and the county hired a law firm, Sheppard Mullin, to investigate the allegations. The investigator at the law firm declined to comment.
While the investigation is ongoing and Kwong is on leave, he has earned as much as $1 million in pay and benefits in a year,\u00a0according to the website of Transparent California, a public employees pay and pension database.\u00a0A graduate of UCLA Medical School, Kwong has worked at Harbor-UCLA since 1990,\u00a0his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 shows. He did not respond to an email and a voicemail seeking comment.
In late June, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the independent organization overseeing accreditation of post-medical school residency and fellowship programs, placed Harbor-UCLA on probation,\u00a0according to its website.\u00a0The move followed a site visit in April by the organization after Fernandez-Frackelton and all 64 of her emergency department residents submitted a complaint to the overseer about the toxic work environment in the hospital\u2019s orthopedics unit, previously led by Kwong.
After she complained to her superiors about the toxic environment her residents encountered in the orthopedics unit, Fernandez-Frackelton, 53, was removed as program director of the emergency department. She had led it for 12 years, but in June, a younger, less experienced man replaced her, according to her lawsuit. Fernandez-Frackelton was told the department needed to give \u201ca talented guy a chance before you turn into a pumpkin,\u201d the lawsuit says.\u00a0\u00a0
A representative of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services declined to comment on the litigation but said in a statement, \u201cHarbor-UCLA Medical Center is committed to the health and safety of our patients and staff. These allegations of misconduct are being thoroughly investigated and, if substantiated, will result in appropriate corrective actions.\u00a0We deeply value the trust the public places in our dedicated medical and patient care teams.\u00a0Safeguarding patient care is our highest priority.\u201d
In another recent incident involving UCLA, James Heaps, a longtime gynecologist at UCLA\u2019s student health center and Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center,\u00a0was sentenced in April to 11 years in prison\u00a0for sexually abusing female patients for years. UCLA paid $700 million to settle hundreds of complaints from Heaps\u2019 patients, some of whom said the university ignored their complaints.
In June, Robert Hadden, a longtime former OB-GYN at Columbia University in New York, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for molesting patients over decades.\u00a0An additional 300 Hadden patients\u00a0sued Columbia this month, saying it had covered up for him.\u00a0And last year, the University of Michigan\u00a0paid $490 million to more than 1,000 students\u00a0who said they were abused by Robert Anderson, a sports doctor.
Carol Gillam represents the three physicians in their lawsuits against Los Angeles County. In a statement, she said: \u201cThis story is unfortunately an all too familiar one about powerful doctors at prestigious teaching hospitals abusing patients and flaunting their own privileges and connections to the men who are supposed to supervise, discipline and remove them.\u201d
Among the incidents involving patient abuse at Harbor-UCLA, according to one of the lawsuits, is an episode when Badkoobehi saw Kwong \u201cengaged in \u2018finger banging\u2019 of surgical hip wounds\u201d on an unconscious patient while making sexual sounds and saying he was \u201cfinding the G-spot.\u201d In another, Kwong allegedly undraped an anesthetized patient in front of Badkoobehi \u201cto look at his penis after being told it was large.\u201d
Hsu also alleges that Kwong regularly delayed urgent trauma operations so he could perform elective, nonacute operations. \u201cThere were definitely times where we had to move other multiple patients around to accommodate his elective cases,\u201d Hsu said in an interview, adding that the delays could extend to more than a week. That was reported to management, but Kwong faced no repercussions, the suit says.
Badkoobehi provided texts to NBC News showing that in 2016 the hospital\u2019s CEO confirmed that the allegations against Kwong were \u201cvery serious\u201d and that the facility\u2019s risk management unit was aware and involved. Nothing changed, the surgeon said. All three of the doctors say they received lower pay than their male counterparts at the facility.\u00a0
The suits describe misogynistic incidents at the hospital; one example: When Kwong asked other Harbor-UCLA employees, \u201cWho wants to take body shots off Dr. Badkoobehi?\u201d Residents in the Harbor-UCLA program were also encouraged to attend strip clubs together, one lawsuit says, with a female resident saying \u201cshe was taken to the strip club from work without her consent.\u201d At a lecture by Kwong that students and residents were required to attend, it says, Kwong asked Badkoobehi and other women there: \u201cWhat sexual position causes a penile fracture?\u201d He kept pushing for a response, the lawsuit says, until he got the answer: \u201creverse cowgirl.\u201d
As director of the orthopedics residency program at the hospital, Kwong attended faculty meetings to select candidates. At one point, one lawsuit says, Kwong held up pictures of two Black male candidates, asking: \u201cDo you want Brother X or Brother Y?\u201d
Since 2016, Kwong has received over $800,000 in payments from medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, more than the mean payments received by other physicians in the specialty,\u00a0according to records from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He has also received $665,000 in associated research funding from pharmaceutical and medical device makers on a project for which he is a principal investigator.
\u201cI love working with the patients,\u201d Fernandez-Frackelton told NBC News. \u201cIt\u2019s an underserved population, the working poor in Los Angeles, and really satisfying and rewarding to care for them. But our system should respond to complaints about the inadequate care they are getting.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n