TORONTO – For a decade, Sveta Kohli has been embroiled in a complaints process that she says has taken a severe toll on her mental health. She said she still does not feel comfortable being alone with a male doctor or even in the elevator alone with a man.
Kohli said she couldn’t get out of bed for days after she learned that Ontario’s medical watchdog was again refusing — for the third time — to send her complaint about Dr. Paul O’Connor to a public discipline hearing, reported Toronto Star.
“They’ve discredited me completely,” she said in a tearful interview with the Toronto Star. “I feel hopeless. It’s despicable.”
For over a decade, the Toronto woman has been embroiled in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare that she says has taken a severe toll on her mental health, and has led her to lose confidence in the oversight of medical professionals in Ontario.
Her complaint of alleged sexual abuse at the hands of the former St. Michael’s Hospital neurologist has bounced back and forth between the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s committee that handles complaints and the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board (HPARB) — the civilian body that hears appeals from that college committee.
O’Connor has always denied the allegations.
Twice, HPARB ordered the college’s Inquiries, Complaints and Reports committee to take another look at Kohli’s complaint. The board found that in those first two instances, the complaints committee focused on Kohli’s interactions with O’Connor when she was no longer his patient, and failed to adequately review her allegations from when she was his patient.
And so the complaints committee took a third look, and just a few weeks ago, Kohli and her lawyer received the news: the complaint would still not be sent to the college’s discipline committee for a public hearing.
The committee said its decision was largely due to the passage of time since the complaint was first submitted, which could make it difficult for the doctor to mount a defence.
O’Connor, who told the committee he has a serious health condition, also voluntarily resigned last year and promised not to reapply for a licence in any jurisdiction, which the committee also took into account.
Rosy Rumpal, Kohli’s lawyer, said her client is now considering her options.
“Given the evidence and numerous records available to the college from the first instance of the reporting in 2006, the issue of boundaries was clear, and the matter should have been referred directly to the discipline committee,” she said.
“Had this been done from the outset, we may very well have witnessed a completely different result — and expeditiously. This back and forth between HPARB and (the college) over 10 years has been a pointless exercise in administrative law and has left my client in an even worse position.”
According to the most recent complaints committee decision, Kohli had seen O’Connor as a patient on several occasions between 1998 and 2003, although she’s adamant it was until 2004. She had been seeing him with concerns about a potential diagnosis for multiple sclerosis, a disease she now knows she does not have.
Her complaint includes allegations that during her medical visits to O’Connor in spring 2003, he suggested she “looked only 28 or 29 and aged like a bottle of wine and he would like to drink her,” according to the most recent complaints committee decision.
She also alleged in the complaint and in her interview with the Star that kissing and touching was sometimes involved, that O’Connor rubbed his genitals against her, had her give him a massage at the hospital and asked about her sexual history when it was not medically necessary to do so.
After she was no longer his patient, they continued talking over email until early 2006 and occasionally saw each other in person until late 2005, Kohli said, when she alleges O’Connor tried to pin her down in her home and kiss her.
In previous responses to the complaints committee, O’Connor said he did meet Kohli on some of the occasions she mentioned, but nothing improper happened and his comments were made in a “joking and teasing” way.
He said boundaries were “strictly maintained” while she was his patient, and that nothing sexual or improper was said or done, and that they became casual friends after the doctor-patient relationship ended.
Courtesy Toronto Star
