Dr. Robert Pearl Routinely and Consistently Fails to Place Patient Care Issues Topmost in His Patheon of Priorities Oakland, California

Dr. Robert Pearl, currently serving as CEO and Executive Director of the Permanente Medical Group, consistently avoids personal involvement in issues critical to the maintenance of patient care excellence.

Repeated patient appeals to his Office for relief from unhelpful local policies go unanswered.

Silence and delegated punitive retaliations by underlings seems to be Dr. Pearl's modus operandi.

As such, Dr. Pearl is perpetuating an atrophying of patient care excellence which began some years ago within Kaiser Permanente, when the accumulation of power began to overshadow previous patient care commitments made in more idealistic times.

When administrators fail even to share a pleasant word with patients suffering real hardships at the hands of medical personnel serving under them, as a nurse, I feel obliged to attempt to provide a wake up call to those individuals.

Thus far, Dr. Pearl has been impervious to patient appeals, preferring rather to hide solemnly behind his title and appointees, rather than leading by example, and personally involving himself in correcting the most blatant abuses taking place on his watch.

Recently in Sacramento, in the case of Dr. Susan Scholey, and her persecution of colleagues and patients alike, when Dr. Pearl saw that his Sacramento administrators were not going to handle the situation to prevent further suffering, his office should have intervened.

However, the overall impression was that Dr. Pearl purposely exacerbated those situations by ordering a cut off of essential services to patients, even though such cut offs were, if done openly by an individual, blatantly in violation of both federal and state laws.

Within the context of an HMO, however, it is difficult to affix blame when patients are made to suffer.

This is especially true under the provisions of the Permanente Medical Group's employment contract which seems to essentially prevent any physician from speaking up for patients in the event of serious errors by colleagues.

Once an administrator has been informed repeatedly of an abuse, and still there is nothing emanating from his office other than patient retaliations, one has to wonder why such an office exists.

It would seem that Dr. Pearl is interested in any issue, so long he does not have to wade into Kaiser medical systems as an advocate for patient care excellence. Perhaps Dr. Pearl considers such work a violation of his dignity. In effect, though, as a physician, we all hope that such work would be first on his agenda always. When it is not, the public is in jeopardy of paying dearly for a service that is more myth than fact.

I have yet to witness Dr. Pearl on any occasion intervene on behalf of a suffering patient.

Perhaps some day that will happen. We can only hope. However, it certainly didn't happen in the most recent case of elder abuse vis a vis Dr. Susan Scholey, Dr. Robert Midgley, and Dr. Richard Isaacs.

And, that is the sad reality.