The court will issue a tentative ruling before each writ hearing, and may do so on Law and Motion matters. Persons requesting a hearing must immediatedly notify opposing counsel. If no request for a hearing is made, no hearing will be held and the tentative ruling will become the ruling of the court. On the basis of these findings, respondent revoked petitioner's certificate, stayed the revocation, and placed the certificate on probation for three years.
Petitioner challenges the validity of respondent's findings and penalty.
The court finds no legal or factual basis for respondent's conclusion that petitioner aided the unauthorized practice of medicine in violation of the Business and Professions Code. In fact, respondent expressly found that the evidence in the administrative record was insufficient to establish that either Ms. Abustan or Ms. Zafar examined, palpated or treated medical patients in any manner, either in petitioner's office or in the hospital where he had privileges. Rather, the great weight of the evidence in the record establishes that Ms. Abustan and Ms. Zafar performed essentially clerical or secretarial services for petitioner, collecting medical supplies and equipment for his use and at his direction, writing down verbatim petitioner's statements during his examination of patients in the patients' hospital and office charts, writing orders dictated by petitioner in patients' hospital and office charts, preparing patient discharge summaries, writing prescriptions dictated by petitioner on his preprinted prescription pads, and preparing pre-operative reports from petitioner's verbatim statements and chart information. Although some irregularities in recordkeeping may have occurred when petitioner occasionally failed to sign a chart entry recorded by Ms. Abustan or Ms. Zafar or when they signed his name on prescriptions that he had dictated, neither Ms. Abustan nor Ms. Zafar performed any medical service or act when they transcribed petitioner's statements, instructions, orders and prescriptions or when they prepared pre-operative reports. In particular, their interpretation of petitioner's abbreviations and symbols in the course of preparing the pre-operative reports appears to be typical of secretarial tasks and did not involve them in the tasks of collecting, assessing and interpreting medical data to diagnose, treat, or prescribe treatment for physical or medical conditions.