When the mother of rapper Kanye West died a day after having plastic surgery, attention shifted quickly to Dr. Jan Adams, the Los Angeles physician who performed the operation.
A Los Angeles County coroner's report did not fault errors in the surgery itself. But in a separate matter, state officials have questioned whether Adams should be practicing medicine at all.
Last year, the Medical Board of California and the state attorney general's office filed a formal accusation to revoke or suspend Adams' license to practice medicine. The document filed April 10 cited Adams' three convictions related to two incidents in which he was accused of drunk driving.
A hearing date has not been set, but in the meantime, Adams is allowed to practice medicine.
Such a lag is not unusual.
It takes an average of 934 days from the receipt of a complaint to the completion of judicial review, according to the board's most recent annual report.
Slightly more than half of that, 488 days, is the average time spent by the Medical Board and attorney general's office investigating a complaint and preparing a formal accusation. The rest of the time is spent waiting for the case to be resolved by an administrative law judge or settled.
The length of time it takes to resolve complaints has been increasing overall during the last decade. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1999, it took an average of 722 days for the process to be completed.
The Medical Board has been criticized because of the long waits, as well as other reasons. Most recently, board members came under attack for allowing doctors with alcohol and drug problems to go into a confidential state-monitored program while seeking addiction treatment.
The program allowed accused doctors to avoid the public disciplinary process, but five audits found that it was not working. The medical board voted unanimously to end the program; it will expire July 1.
The controversy has prompted state officials to pay more attention to how other boards discipline healthcare providers. At a legislative hearing last week, state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles) urged that audits be performed on similar substance-abuse programs for nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals.
The length of time it takes to discipline doctors has been a controversial issue for the board for many years.
