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Quality Assurance reports have been at the center of contention between minority and non-minority doctors for years at Southside Regional Medical Center, according to a physician who has practiced there since 1989.

Like others stepping up with information about inappropriate behavior by hospital administrators and staff, and the delivery of substandard care and procedures, the physician has also asked to remain unnamed. His comments, however, were taped during an interview Sunday.

The doctor said he was speaking on behalf of several minority doctors employed there.

He said Quality Assurance reports are routinely peppered with incidences of cronyism and nepotism, and that 77 percent of doctors’ charts that have come up in recent times for Quality Assurance have been focused on minority doctors. He said when he looked into the matter, 68 percent of those issues focused on just one physician.

"We looked into it to find out what the problem was - why the minorities were always up for QA," he said. "We found out that’s how they were keeping track of the minority physicians while the same problems were going on for white physicians." "What made me look into it more, is that I knew there were three cases involving two white physicians and a minority physician.

Those two cases had just happened to disappear when I went to look for the records on QA," the doctor said.

He said there is a sequence of events to follow when there is a problem with Quality Assurance. "But they were skipping past the section on certain minority physicians and going straight to the Executive Committee," the doctor said.

He said the other percentage of QA problems are pointed at white doctors - whose misdeeds are usually expunged.

"That’s because they’re part of the good ol’ boy system at the hospital," he said.

Referencing incidents among his white colleagues - some of which involved the mistreatment of patients - the doctor said he was appalled that their histories had disappeared. "When I started looking into the Quality Assurance area, I noticed that the two white doctors’ information had disappeared." He also noted that one of the doctors was on the Executive Committee. "When I approached them (about his f ndings), they said ‘we’ll just start it all over and do it right,’" he said.

"On the other hand, if you go and look at the minority physicians’ histories, they are well documented. They’re all over the place," he said. He said that for the most part, such incidences might be alright if they were kept in a closed session that didn’t go beyond the confi nes of the hospital.

"But if the chief of staff decides he’s going to give a recommendation (for a doctor to work elsewhere) - although he’s not supposed to do that, he can look into the doctor’s record and fi nd out if they ever had any QA issues. He can then make comments (pertaining to that)," he said. "And, that makes a doctor look bad.".

He said, yet when the minorities’ records were opened during peer review sessions, there was usually a 100 percent agreement that none of the minorities had a problem. "So it was more like harassment of minority doctors going on at the hospital," the physician said.

He added that former chief of staff, Thomas Ross, played a major role in this kind of good ol’ boy behavior. Corroborating comments in previous articles about claims of sexual harassment at SRMC, the doctor said that for years, Ross partook of that kind of offensive behavior by telling ribald sexual jokes. According to the physician, Ross appeared to have mostly targeted nurses with his "verbalization of dirty jokes," which he added, "the nurses found them very, very offensive."

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