As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Dr. Therese Duane recently defeated a lawsuit brought against her by the family of a patient, Berman DePaz-Martinez, who died while under her care. At issue was Duane’s unilateral decision to remove DePaz-Martinez from a ventilator, which quickly caused his death as he could not breathe on his own.
While Duane and her legal team successfully argued that her actions were not intended to kill DePaz-Martinez and that she had acted within her “medical discretion,” a string of whistleblower allegations have followed, painting an alarming picture.
Duane currently works for Texas Health Services, performing surgery at Envision Surgical Services in Fort Worth; the allegations stem from her time as chief of surgery at nearby John Peter Smith (JPS) Hospital.
At the time, senior JPS staff were sent a whistleblower letter from “concerned employees from multiple disciplines” outlining nine separate instances in which patients under Duane’s care died or suffered needlessly.
One such account by the whistleblowers involved a 24-year-old male who allegedly arrived at the JPS trauma bay in critical condition after a motor vehicle collision. The young man suffered from severe blood loss and a low pulse, which reportedly improved after medical staff gave him a blood transfusion.
As the medical team scrambled to save the young man’s life, the whistleblowers claimed that Dr. Duane arrived and immediately demanded that they “stop care.” Allegedly, with the man still alive, Duane called his time of death.
However, attending staff all agreed that the patient had “the potential for survival if they [were to] cross-clamp his aorta and give him more blood.” Nevertheless, they claimed Duane refused to allow them to continue providing him care.
As Duane and other medical personnel stepped outside the trauma bay to discuss who would update the patient’s family, a nurse still inside reportedly called out, “Is he supposed to be breathing?”
The document alleged that the patient was still alive on the table at this point, breathing on his own.
“Yeah, that’s how they look when they are dead,” Duane jeered back, according to the account.
Duane then reportedly reentered the trauma bay and approached the patient. She examined him for a moment before giving clearance for the medical staff to resume care, according to the whistleblowers.
Staff then advocated for him to be taken to the operating room immediately, but they asserted that Duane ordered imaging testing done on the patient instead.
The whistleblowers maligned that Duane then allegedly “left [this] critical patient” to attend to another patient who was not in an emergency situation.
Not long after, the young auto collision victim died.
The whistleblowers also asserted that upon his death, Duane reportedly chose not to meet with his family but instead decided to “start a laparoscopic appendectomy by herself” on another patient.
Duane apparently did not use best practices, which she allegedly later admitted to staff, and the patient sustained bowel injury “which required substantial intervention [of] other surgeons.”
Other allegations in the whistleblower document further disclosed repeated instances of malpractice and potential malice.
In the case of a 23-year-old female who arrived at JPS in severe pain after complications from an abortion, Duane allegedly told staff, “You know why she is sick? She did this to herself.”
Duane then reportedly refused to send the young woman to the operating room despite the patient suffering immense pain and begging “the primary RN to not let her die.”
Many long hours later, the patient was finally sent to the operating room, where it was discovered she had dead bowel, a serious and fatal condition in which reduced blood flow to areas of the gastrointestinal tract causes necrosis.
The patient soon began to experience cardiac arrest. During resuscitative measures, the whistleblowers claimed that Duane arrived and demanded that they stop administering care, stating, “What are you doing? Stop compressions.”
After the staff stopped, they asserted that Duane walked over to the young woman, kissed her on the forehead, said a Hail Mary, and walked out of the room.
In yet another revealing allegation against Duane, whistleblowers claimed that a middle-aged man in her care was suffering from a gunshot wound and was being monitored for potential organ and tissue donation.
As his condition worsened, Duane allegedly instructed medical personnel not to intervene to save his life. She reportedly told staff that “JPS was organ hungry” and that the hospital was trying to “beat out Vanderbilt.”
Vanderbilt is the nation’s leading hospital for organ transplantation.
The document ended with an appeal for the hospital to take action.
“We can no longer stand by and condone these acts through our silence, violating the tenet of beneficence,” the whistleblowers wrote.
“We have always made it our priority to care for patients who are sick, despite their available resources … Yet, we are being asked to look the other way as the chief of surgery commits such egregious acts.”
The Dallas Express sent Duane’s current employer our initial reporting on these allegations with a series of questions for comment. As of the writing of this article, Texas Health Services had not responded.
