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In reply to the discussion: “It may out-Ferguson Ferguson”: Why Milwaukee’s police violence will horrify you [View all]Divernan
(15,480 posts)about a long history of criminally negligent and just plain criminal behavior by a psychiatrist employed by the county, who was allowed to retire with a huge pension AND to avoid investigation of charges against him regarding maltreatment of patients. Shows how WI Medical Licensing Board protects its own against malpractice and/or other criminal complaints. That happened in Pennsylvania also. The great majority of malpractice claims were brought against a handful of physicians (repeatedly, against the same docs) but our medical licensing board refused to take their licenses away.
And THAT, boys and girls, is why physicians experience huge malpractice insurance costs. The majority of docs are paying for a handful of incompetent or amoral docs. I don't want to hear how "tort reform" will solve the high malpractice insurance premiums until AFTER the state medical boards grow a pair and start stripping the handful of bad apples of their medical licenses, and do so through a federal data base so these docs cannot skip from one state to another.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/122847179.html
The Sentinel did an outstanding series investigating abuse of the mentally ill within the system, including a psychiatrist who cut short any prosecution when he retired on a +$50,000 a year pension.
Strelnick was paid about $175,000 a year working as a staff psychiatrist at the county's Mental Health Complex. He worked for the county for 18 years, starting in 1991. He brought a history of having had his medical license suspended for having sex with patients while in private practice in Madison in the late 1980s.
During his early years working for the county, he was permitted to treat only male patients because of restrictions placed on his state license, state records show. The restrictions were lifted in 1997, but further allegations of sexual contact with patients periodically surfaced. A former patient in 2006 accused Strelnick of having sex with her at the complex in 2002. Another patient surfaced in 2010 and said she and Strelnick had sex regularly while she was a patient of his in the 1980s.
It's a crime under state law for a therapist to have sex with a patient and also a violation of ethical standards.
A criminal investigation by the state Justice Department into the 2002 allegations resulted in no prosecution. Investigators said they found the woman to be credible but worried she couldn't bear up under the stress of testifying. The state Medical Examining Board also investigated but brought no disciplinary charges. The investigator expressed concerns about whether the patient's criminal history would make it hard to prove allegations against Strelnick.