Medical Licensure Board fires executive director

It’s been a busy week for the state Board of Medical Licensure, which got rid of its executive director, learned of allegations against a former board member and disciplined the chairman of the state Board of Health.

The licensure board said goodbye on Thursday to Dr. John R. Hall — a rare possessor of a medical license, a law license and an MBA. The board did not give a reason for its decision.

But Hall, who could not be reached for comment, had become more aggressive in trying to hold doctors accountable than the board had been in many years.

Hall, who was earning $250,000 a year, alienated some members when he pushed for a bill this year that would have made it a felony for any physician to have sex with a patient.

Some doctors worried the bill went too far because it criminalized not just sex with patients, but consensual kissing and conversations about sex. They expressed concern the bill criminalized these same activities if a doctor engaged in them with a “key third party” — someone in a close personal relationship with the patient.

Hall defended the bill, which failed to pass.

“There is no other more intimate relationship,” he told Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “Our clergy never get us out of clothes. Our insurance agents never get us out of our clothes. We don’t tell anybody the thing that we tell doctors, so that is a very special relationship we need to preserve and protect.”

The question prompted debate on the board as to the best ways to deal with allegations of sexual abuse against physicians.

A 2016 study by Atlanta Journal-Constitution ranked Mississippi dead last among all 50 states and the District of Columbia when it came to protecting patients from bad doctors, including the problem of physician sexual abuse.

But board member Dr. Randy Easterling called the study “greatly flawed,” saying the American Medical Association “already has a code of ethics that would prohibit this. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution article shouldn’t be taken as gospel.”

He said state and federal laws already exist to address this problem.

The board has come under criticism from consumer rights advocacy groups for its disciplinary record and transparency.

In 1995, one of those groups, Public Citizen, had ranked Mississippi’s board the strongest in physician discipline, with the highest rate of suspensions and revocations in the United States. A decade later, the board was ranked last, although Mississippi was in 17th place in Public Citizen’s study of 2009 to 2011 data.

In a 2016 study by the Informed Patient Institute and Consumer Reports, the licensure board’s website ranked the lowest in the nation.

Hall vowed to improve the website and to protect the public from “bad medicine.”

Within a few months, a number of doctors in trouble with the board had surrendered their licenses and quit practicing medicine.

The licensure board received some good marks in a recent University of Michigan study, which concluded Mississippi has taken more major disciplinary actions against physicians per capita than most other states.

In an unrelated matter, the board on Thursday disciplined Dr. Luke Lampton, chairman of the state Board of Health, under a consent order.

Lampton, who has a medical office in the small town of Magnolia, admitted to the board that he had signed extra prescriptions in case his patients who rely on suboxone, a drug for opioid addiction, ran out of medication.

He told the board he had done this out of fear a problem might arise with his patients while he was out of town on vacation since he is the only doctor in the area prescribing the drug.

He told the board he realizes what he did was a mistake, and he deeply regrets what he did.

The board suspended his license for six month, but held the order in abeyance, which means Lampton can continue to practice during this probationary period.

If no further problems arise during a year, the order would be dismissed.

Also this week, the licensure board took in the news that the name of one of its past members had arisen in a prescription drug investigation in north Mississippi.

Dr. Dwalia South of Ripley, who was appointed to the licensure board by then-Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, has been accused of scheming with nurse practitioner Brenda Shelton to conceal the fact Shelton was writing prescriptions by writing her name under Shelton’s on old prescriptions.

Authorities claim South and Shelton worked with Hollis Discount Pharmacy of Ripley to alter the prescriptions in the Board of Pharmacy’s prescription monitoring program.

Although South faces accusations, she has not been charged.

The 62-year-old family physician no longer serves on the licensure board but in 2015 was appointed to the state Board of Health.

In 2003, she was named Mississippi Family Physician of the Year and was listed as one of America's Top Family Doctors of the Year in 2004-05.

Contact Jerry Mitchell at 601-961-7064 or jmitchell@gannett.com. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.