Worst time of her life
Five years later, after taking prednisone for another asthma flare-up, Dr. Haney had a more severe manic episode and was hospitalized.
The consulting psychiatrist who evaluated her reported her case to the medical board, stating she had bipolar disorder, was mentally incompetent, and shouldn’t be practicing medicine. The board opened a second investigation of her in 2012, which lasted 4 months.
Dr. Haney had quit her job at Bay Area Hospital in 2011 because she was pregnant and was planning to take a year off to care for the baby at home.
“That was the worst time of my life. I lost the baby at 4 months, I wasn’t working, and now I was under investigation by the board again,” she says.
The board issued an “interim stipulated order” that required that she be monitored regularly for mental illness and substance abuse by the Health Professionals Services Program (HPSP) for 2 years. “The board accused me of abusing prednisone, which I wasn’t. I was using it as prescribed and medically indicated,” she said.
The board order was reported to the National Practitioner Databank and is now permanently in her record. Although the board cleared her to work, she could not find a permanent job in a hospital emergency department.
“The repeated ‘nondisciplinary’ public board orders have had the same net impact on my career as if I had been disciplined for killing or harming my patients. For all intents and purposes, people treat it as a disciplinary action for the rest of your career,” she said.
To keep afloat financially, she found locum tenens work in local emergency departments until 2019.
Mental health toll
Dr. Haney feels that the stress of repeated board investigations has affected her mental health. “Both times this happened, it made my mental health worse, made the mania worse, and subsequent depression worse.”
Particularly distressing to her was the fact that the administrative staff who investigated her were attorneys and persons in law enforcement, rather than medical professionals with mental health training.
“I was required to disclose intimate personal details of my psychological and psychiatric history to anybody at the board who requested them. These investigators were asking me about my childhood history. That was traumatic and none of their business!”
Dr. Haney had quietly managed episodes of major depression since she was in her early 20s with the help of a psychiatrist. Her third episode of mania, which occurred in 2014, triggered a more severe depression, which she says deepened when she learned that the HPSP had notified the board about her manic symptoms and that she would not be released from the 2-year monitoring contract. When the board notified her 2 weeks later that they were opening another investigation, Dr. Haney says she had an emotional crisis, attempted suicide, and was briefly hospitalized. Several weeks later, she decided to take a mood stabilizer, which she continues to take.
The board’s 2015 corrective action agreement required Dr. Haney to practice medicine only in settings that the board’s medical director preapproved and to obtain a preapproved monitoring health care provider who would send quarterly reports to the medical director. Dr. Haney says the “nondisciplinary” action agreement was also reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank.
She also agreed to ongoing monitoring by the HPSP for mental illness and substance abuse, which involved random drug testing. When she didn’t call in one day in 2019 and missed a scheduled test, the board opened another investigation on her that lasted 7 months until July 2020. Dr. Haney said this was despite three subsequent negative tests.
Dr. Haney believes that the “open investigation” doomed a job offer from a hospital emergency department in the Virgin Islands. “I had passed all the required credentialing and explained previous board orders. They pulled the rug from under me 1 week before I was supposed to move there,” says Dr. Haney.
Her license was inactivated again because she hadn’t practiced medicine for a year, which she says was a new board policy. Although Dr. Haney says the medical director reactivated her license after talking with her, “By the time I was able to apply emergency medicine jobs, no one was interested in me anymore.”