Attorney calls surgeon's hiring at Marion VA hospital 'egregious'

An attorney for a Kentucky woman whose husband died after gallbladder surgery at a VA hospital in Southern Illinois says the VA's hiring of the surgeon with a questionable record is "the most egregious" concern in the case.

Bob Shank, 50, bled to death a day after his Aug. 9 laparoscopic surgery by Dr. Jose Veizaga-Mendez at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Marion, according to his widow's lawyer, Jim Harmon.

The doctor resigned three days later, shortly before the hospital suspended inpatient surgeries due to a reported spike in post-surgical deaths from October 2006 to March 2007. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said Veizaga-Mendez had some role in nine deaths when the typical mortality rate would have been two.

Veizaga-Mendez, while simultaneously licensed in Illinois, surrendered his Massachusetts medical license last year after accusations of "grossly" substandard care.

Insistent that Bob Shank died after undergoing what should have been one of the "most mundane procedures you can think of," Harmon said "the most egregious thing was that [Veizaga-Mendez] was on staff" in Marion.

"Someone was tasked with the responsibility at the Marion VA of assuring that only qualified surgeons are on staff there, and this just boggles my mind," Harmon said this week. "There's got to be something that horribly went wrong with the credentialing process there; there might not have been one. ...

"I can't imagine how even the most rudimentary check of the last hospitals he was on staff at [in Massachusetts] would not have revealed gigantic problems with this guy," Harmon said.

Repeated efforts by The Associated Press to find a listed telephone number or address for Veizaga-Mendez have failed.

Shank's widow, Katrina, has filed a claim against the U.S. government as a precursor to a possible federal lawsuit, and plans an aggressive legal push to flush out why Veizaga-Mendez got hired in Marion despite his documented troubles, Harmon said.

Pete McBrady, the acting director of the VA hospital, has told the Southern Illinoisan newspaper in Carbondale that a group of physicians at the Marion site typically vets each candidate for hire.

Such scrutiny includes whether the applicant is licensed in other states and if he or she has a record in the National Practitioner Data Bank, a clearinghouse of tort or malpractice claims against physicians.

Personal clinical references also are questioned.

The panel found nothing that raised red flags before Veizaga-Mendez was hired, McBrady has insisted.