Philly VA doc defends himself before Congress
The New York Times‘ Walt Bogdanich has followed up his investigation into a “rogue” cancer unit at a Philadelphia VA hospital with a report on the questioning of one of the alleged rogue doctors, Gary Kao, at a congressional panel headed by Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter. Kao defended himself by claiming that the mistakes he made during a process called brachytherapy (in which tiny radioactive seeds are inserted into a patient’s prostate) were nothing out of the ordinary.
Dr. Kao did not deny placing large numbers of seeds outside the prostate, but he said investigators were wrong to single him out. “It’s a recognized risk of the procedure,” he told the panel.
Dr. Kao’s assertion was disputed by Steven A. Reynolds, who oversees materials safety at the N.R.C., which regulates all nuclear materials. Cases where large numbers of seeds miss the prostate, Mr. Reynolds said, “happen very, very infrequently.”
Kao said he voluntarily appeared before the panel to set the record straight and correct what he called “very serious false allegations” made by Bogdanich’s initial article.
VA: Consent forms for human studies incomplete
According to a report released by the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General, an audit of representative VA hospitals found that about 31 percent of informed consent documentation for human studies was incomplete. In the vast majority (97 percent) of cases, this was due to lack of a witness signature.
Among the report’s other findings:
- An estimated 1 percent (1,023) of the 110,231 non-compliant lacked the subject’s signature or that of their authorized representative, rendering them legally ineffective.
- An estimated 1.7 percent of the 367,103 consent forms could not be located, the report extrapolated the national range to be somewhere between 0.6 percent and 4.5 percent.
- In specific situations, Institutional Review Boards can waive informed consent. In two of the 33 such cases examined, sufficient documentation of this waiver was not found.
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