Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-This article is a bell that the California Department of Consumer Affairs doesn’t want to be rung about one of its 42 Boards that license and regulate an array of industries in the state, including the California Veterinary Medical Board.
If you follow this column on a regular basis, you know that in the past year alone, stories I broke exposing government incompetence and corruption have been picked up by the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCBS-2 and KFI AM-640, and others because the subjects are often of great public interest, deeply researched and pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Follow along on this one …
A beautiful little rescue dog of mine named Judi got pneumonia last fall. While survival from any illness is never assured, whether in the medical or veterinary world, we are all entitled to the highest levels of competence, effort and care, and of transparency, integrity and honesty regarding that competence, effort and care.
In my decades of animal rescue, I have been blessed to work with a slew of amazing veterinarians, dealing with everything from cancer to amputations, never once even considering filing a complaint with the California Veterinary Medical Board…until last September.
That was when Dr. Andrew Cruikshank, a veterinarian at ACCESS Veterinary Hospital in Woodland Hills, was tasked with providing care for Judi, and at the significant expense one might expect at an emergency/specialty vet hospital. After putting Judi on oxygen therapy, to which she appeared to respond well, I never heard from Dr. Cruikshank again. Ever.
I never heard from Dr. Cruikshank before Judi died 9 hours later, despite multiple calls that day for an update, expecting to receive his promised plan of treatment. No word, not to this day.
Later that night, I got a call from the overnight vet, Dr. Jennifer Geiger, who advised that I needed to come to the hospital right away because “Judi was going down fast and was about to die.” I shouted, “What?” We raced in a panic to ACCESS, only to get a call from Dr. Geiger as we were on the off-ramp, a minute away from the hospital, that Judi had just died.
A minute or so later, we were at ACCESS Veterinary and were brought to a room to be with Judi’s remains, where her body – just a minute or so after we were told she had just then died -- was already ice cold.
But that wasn’t the only way we knew something was amiss.
We knew there was trouble because they also brought us a memorial cast impression of Judi’s paw, as is customarily done when a pet dies. It was bone dry.
If Judi had died just a minute or so earlier, why was the foot print, which takes about 25 to 30 minutes to dry, already dry? Did Dr. Geiger and the ACCESS Veterinary Hospital staff take a memorial paw impression of a dog who was still alive, instead of trying to save her life? Not likely. Judi almost certainly died at the time of Dr. Geiger’s first call, when she said Judi was about to die.
We know this because the original paw impression ACCESS Veterinary Hospital gave us was done so sloppily, we asked them to do it again, and the second one took about a half hour to dry.
Dr. Geiger offered no explanation about the timing or circumstances of Judi’s death. Just her sympathy, as she left the room, never to return.
And that’s just the beginning.
Having spent those 30 minutes tearfully saying goodbye to Judi, we exited with her re-done paw impression and were advised by the front desk that we would receive a precise to-the-penny refund of the unused portion of the deposit we paid when we left Judi there earlier in the day.
When I asked for a breakdown of the bill, the receptionist could not provide it. I asked, “How can you know how much to refund me if you can’t specify what care was provided to Judi?” I got no answer and requested a copy of the entire file, but the receptionist said she didn’t have one to provide. Dr. Geiger would not come to the front to explain what was going on, or what really happened that night.
With neither veterinarian willing to explain what happened, I was told the next day by ACCESS Veterinary Hospital, “if you want, we can have someone from Admin call you.”
No. We want to know from Judi’s veterinarians, licensed by the State of California, what happened to her.
According to the California Veterinary Medical Board, veterinary clients must be given their entire file within five days. But when that deadline passed, ACCESS still withheld records, namely Judi’s treatment sheet, the whereabouts of which ACCESS’s Medical Director – whose own license was registered to a hospital other than ACCESS -- could not explain.
When we eventually got Judi’s treatment sheet, none of my three other veterinarians could decipher what happened on the night of Judi’s passing. As I prepared to file a complaint with the VMB, ACCESS refused to provide the doctors’ license numbers, which I only received after a day-long barrage of email exchanges.
As with so many stories I have reported here on CityWatch, it took months to piece together the facts, in this case, compiling an extensive complaint to the VMB, including timed screenshots of each call to the vets, none of which were ever returned in a simple seeking of the truth. After half a year, the Veterinary Medical Board wrote a short letter to me, misstating the facts presented, saying that the vets “could have provided more compassionate communication....”
What, exactly, did ACCESS Veterinary Hospital, and Drs. Cruikshank and Geiger say happened in their response to my complaint?
After weeks of unsuccessful wrangling to get the complete and un-redacted complaint file from the VMB, and no additional help from Consumer Affairs, I reached out this week to my California State Senator Bob Hertzberg and State Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian.
If they can’t help, we will sue and make the case to a judge, as Judi’s family and as a journalist, that there is a significant public interest – a life and death concern of great importance to the public – about what happened at ACCESS Veterinary Hospital last fall, where Yelp shows 190 reviews of either 4 or 5 stars, and exactly 100 of just 1, 2 or 3 stars, 77 of which were one-star reviews.
Why mention Yelp? Because when I posted a negative review about ACCESS Veterinary Hospital and inadvertently chose one of their other locations, ACCESS responded almost immediately to have it removed. In other words, ACCESS responded with lightning speed to a negative review about a dog’s death, but nearly a year later, neither of the treating vets made a single call to explain to me what occurred.
Accidents happen, but failure to take responsibility for them is reprehensible, especially for a doctor.
I will get the file, find out what actually happened and report on it in this column, despite the fact that the government agencies established to protect the public and its pets -- the California Veterinary Medical Board and the Department of Consumer Affairs -- are doing everything to prevent it.
Your own pets’ lives may depend on it.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. Verifiable tips and story ideas can be sent to him at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
Tags: Daniel Guss, @The Guss Report, California Department of Consumer Affairs, California Veterinary Medical Board, ACCESS Veterinary Hospital,
