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by Kurt W. Melchior and Deborah E. Beck
May 4, 2007
In a strongly-worded opinion released Wednesday, May 2, 2007, the California Court of Appeal instructed Superior Courts not to meddle in ongoing administrative proceedings. Nossaman successfully represented the defendant in this appeal.
The plaintiffs were eight physicians contesting disciplinary charges brought against them by the Medical Executive Committee (MEC) of a hospital. Unhappy with the MEC’s decision to have separate hearings for each physician, they convinced a Superior Court judge to issue a writ of mandate directing that the hearings be consolidated. The Court of Appeal ruled that — under the exhaustion doctrine, which requires the physicians to go through the MEC’s entire administrative process before seeking judicial relief — the Superior Court had no power to interfere in the MEC’s administrative process.
The Court of Appeal’s decision is important not only to hospital, physician, and medical peer review groups but also to educational, union, and other peer review bodies whose ability to function would have been undermined by the Superior Court’s decision.
The case arose when eight members of the hospital’s medical staff left — on only two days’ notice — for another hospital. Their precipitous departure, which could have jeopardized patient safety and undermined public confidence in the hospital, led to disciplinary proceedings against each of the physicians. The proceedings were conducted pursuant to the hospital’s bylaws, which, like the bylaws of many if not most such organizations, provide for “individual” hearings and expressly require medical staff members to exhaust all administrative remedies before resorting to legal action.
The physicians requested individual hearings. After the MEC nominated eight hearing officers and eight Judicial Review Committee panels to hear each case separately, the physicians demanded that the proceedings be consolidated. Their demands were rejected. Dissatisfied, the physicians asked the Superior Court to order that the hearings be consolidated. The Superior Court did so, strongly criticizing the MEC for what the court thought was unreasonable and prejudiced conduct.
The Court of Appeal reversed that order holding that “the court’s views on matters such as whether the MEC should have negotiated an agreement on consolidation . . . or deferred to a hearing officer on that issue did not entitle it to intervene in the administrative proceedings and micromanage a process entrusted in the first instance to hospitals and their self-governing medical staffs, not to the courts.” (Emphasis added). The Court explained that, as case law makes clear, “a court’s role with respect to a hospital’s disciplinary procedures is confined to safeguarding basic due process rights, which do not include consolidation of hearings, or procedures employed in deciding a consolidation issue.” The Court was not persuaded by the physicians’ arguments that failure to consolidate the individual proceedings would prejudice them and expose them to prohibitive costs:
- Unsupported Claim of Prejudice Insufficient — “The Physicians submit that their cases on the merits will be prejudiced by the failure to consolidate their hearings because they have no subpoena power and might not be able to marshal their witnesses for all of the individual hearings. The record does not demonstrate that any crucial witness will in fact be unavailable … and any potential problems stemming from the lack of subpoena power will be faced equally by both sides in the proceedings. The mere will-o-the-wisp potential for prejudice at this stage is insufficient to overcome the requirement of exhaustion of remedies.” (Emphasis added).
- Cost of individual hearings does not excuse compliance with exhaustion requirement — “The other irreparable harm the Physicians allege is the cost of the individual hearings. . . . [T]he Physicians each submitted a declaration stating that they would ‘probably’ be unable to pursue separate hearings because the cost would be prohibitive.” Citing California case law explaining that ‘[a] remedy will not be deemed inadequate merely because additional time and effort would be consumed by its being pursued through the ordinary course of law” and federal case law holding that ‘litigation expenses, however substantial and nonrecoverable, which are normal incidents of participation in the agency process do not constitute irreparable injury,” the Court held that ‘[t]he expenses the Physicians seek to avoid are thus ‘normal incidents’ of the administrative process, and they are not excepted from the exhaustion requirement by their failure to receive a group discount.” (Emphasis added).
The Court reaffirmed long-settled California law making the exhaustion of administrative remedies a jurisdictional prerequisite to judicial intervention in private administrative proceedings. As the Court’s decision in Eight Unnamed Physicians v. Medical Executive Committee of the Medical Staff of Washington Township Hospital, No. A 113456, recognizes, and as the California Legislature has declared, “it is the policy of this state that peer review be performed by licentiates.” The rationale behind this policy is that medical competence and ethics issues are best resolved by medical professionals who possess the specialized qualifications such decisions require. The courts will not and indeed may not intervene until all remedies afforded by the medical staff’s or other peer review body’s administrative process have been exhausted.
Kurt W. Melchior is a partner at Nossaman with over 30 years’ experience in complex litigation. He can be reached at (415) 438-7279 or kmelchior@nossaman.com.
Deborah E. Beck is a senior associate in the firm’s Litigation practice, specializing in coverage, environmental, and appellate matters. She can be reached at (415) 438-7254 or dbeck@nossaman.com.
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