The story of Dr Gabrielle Horne
serves to remind us that even the ivory towers of academia
sometimes offer no defence against an onslaught of stupidity
and pettiness.
Dr Horne, a cardiologist with a
brilliant record of research, was reinstated last month
to her full clinical and research duties at the Queen
Elizabeth II Health Science Centre of the Capital District
Health Authority in Halifax. She had been barred from
enrolling patients in her clinical trials, and from
working at the congestive heart failure clinic and the
adult congenital heart clinic, since October 2002.
Dr Horne's bosses were so anxious
to revoke her privileges that they invoked a clause
that allowed immediate suspension. They did this by
branding her a danger to patients.
If you're going to attack a doctor's
reputation like that, you'd better be able to back it
up. But Capital Health couldn't do that. They did send
a file to the Nova Scotia College of Physicians, but
the college didn't even deem it worthy of investigation,
never mind a disciplinary hearing. Hardly surprising,
since the District Medical Advisory Committee does not
have one single patient-related complaint against Dr
Horne.
So why is she only getting her
life back four years later? The province's bylaws make
it clear that the whole matter should have been resolved
within six weeks. But these laws were simply ignored.
The matter reached the provincial
legislative, and politicians set to work drafting a
new set of bylaws governing such complaints. Unfortunately
the draft bill is, if anything, even worse than the
legislation which failed Dr Horne so badly. The original
legislation allows the complaint process to drag on
beyond the time limit if both parties agree. The new
bill would allow the health authority to unilaterally
discard the time limit at will.
Even in reinstating Dr Horne, the
board of Capital Health denied her justice. They cleared
her of all allegations of endangering patients, but
left standing the complaint of 'lack of collegiality.'
Dr Horne was given no chance to rebut this allegation.
Instead of being proven, her guilt was simply declared.
Thus a gross miscarriage of justice ends not with an
apology, but with a final smear — and still not
one iota of proof.
Lack of collegiality, in Dr Horne's
case, allegedly meant refusing to let colleagues force
their names into the authors' credits of her research
papers when they had not participated in the research.
It meant having a special contract that allowed her
to devote 75% of her time to research because she was
so obviously a rising star of cardiology. It meant,
frankly, arousing the jealousy of less gifted colleagues.
Those colleagues can take credit
for having dragged down Dr Horne's career. In the process,
they have torpedoed morale at Capital Health, driven
several doctors to leave lest they suffer a fate similar
to Dr Horne's, wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars
on lawyers, and prevented much valuable research into
heart failure. So who has really put patients at risk?
By dressing up office politics
as concern for patients, people in positions of authority
at Capital Health may think they have found a clever
tool of personal destruction. What they're really practising
is institutional suicide.
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