Whistleblower Wants Tenet to Come Clean

More than three years ago, surgeon Charles Rosen blew the whistle on the Tenet (THC)-owned hospital where he worked.

Rosen, who at the time served as chief of surgery at Tenet's Garden Grove Hospital in suburban Southern California, had just learned that he'd spent months operating with instruments cleaned by what appeared to be broken sterilizers. The "flash" sterilizers, often used to clean surgical instruments soiled during operations, had repeatedly failed to kill resilient spores during routine test runs. And now hospital administrators, aware of the positive spore tests all along, were telling Rosen how to explain the situation when federal inspectors showed up for a big evaluation the following day.

Instead, a nauseated Rosen resigned and went straight to federal authorities.

"This information was being withheld from the very surgeons entrusted with care of the surgical patients," Rosen complained in a 2000 resignation letter to then-hospital-CEO Mark Meyers. "Such behavior is beyond belief. I feel it is a deliberate attempt at cover-up for financial reasons."

Meyers responded by saying that the hospital had reacted appropriately, that positive spore tests didn't necessarily indicate a malfunction, that wound infections had not increased and that hospital patients were placed in no danger. A hospital industry watchdog group later largely concurred.

But Rosen dismissed Meyers' reassurances, saying the CEO was relying on "non-physicians making medical judgments," and expressed fresh outrage that he'd been kept in the dark.

Although Meyers claimed that all doctors were properly informed, the hospital's own infection control supervisor indicated otherwise. In a letter to Meyers just after the controversy erupted, Douglas Clark -- a medical doctor who chaired the infection control committee -- said the operating room supervisor had "received instruction from her superior not to share the positive spore-test results with the surgeons."