exhausted – focused on the complainer’s own conduct – cannot itself afford any relief. (Accord, Payne, supra, 130 Cal.App.4th at p. 739 [peer review process wasn’t the remedy for claims of race discrimination].) The distinction was bolstered by the high court’s allusion to a point made in at least two of its earlier decisions (Arbuckle and Runyon), to the effect that a prerequisite of a judicial mandate proceeding would seriously compromise the legislative purpose of whistleblower statutes. Such proceedings are very hard to win if the hospital’s procedures were fair. (Fahlen, supra, 58 Cal.4th at p. 678.) Then came the coup de grace, found in Fahlen’s dissection of the legislative history of section 1278.5 – especially the amendments of 2007 that added subdivision (h) to the statute in its current form: “The legislative history of section 1278.5, subdivision (h) is consistent with a conclusion that the Legislature did not intend to require postponement of a section 1278.5 action even while peer review proceedings against the plaintiff were still in progress, let alone until the final peer review decision had been set aside by mandamus.” (Fahlen, supra, 58 Cal.4th at p. 680, italics added.) The legislative history to which the court alluded is important for our purposes because it demonstrates a harmony between the raw text of subdivision (h) and the Legislature’s intent in writing the text the way it did. Section 1278.5 is a relatively recent statute, having been enacted in 1999. (Stats. 1999, ch. 155 (S.B. 97), § 1.) In 2007, the Legislature extended its coverage to hospital staff physicians. (See Fahlen, supra, 58 Cal.4th at p. 679.) With the 2007 amendments came new subdivision (h), which is so critical here. The Fahlen court’s own shorthand paraphrase of subdivision (h) asserts a view of subdivision (h) with which we find reassuring: The Legislature was obviously contemplating the possibility that section 1278.5 actions could happen at the same time as hospital peer review proceedings. In addition to what we have already quoted, the court said: “Under this provision, a hospital’s medical staff may petition the court for an
staff, acting as an independent body instigating a peer review proceeding, to the hospital itself. But the most basic reason to construe “medical staff’ not to mean “members of the medical staff” is to further the legislative intent which engendered section 1278.5 in the first place. The idea was to protect doctors who spotted problems with hospital patient care or conditions. Applying section 1278.5 liability to individual doctors could greatly complicate the achievement of that purpose. Peer review proceedings are not just potential instruments of retaliation. They can also be the instrument by which alarms about patient care can be aired. Thus doctors Douglas and Clark have the same right to be whistleblowers about Armin’s allegedly substandard care that Armin has to be a whistleblower about theirs. And it makes no difference if the vehicle for Douglas and Clark’s complaints is a peer review proceeding. Construing “medical staff” as Armin urges would make it harder to root out bad practices rather than easier. We therefore affirm the trial court’s judgment dismissing the four individual doctor defendants from the case. C. The Religious Discrimination Claims Armin’s religious discrimination causes of action survived the defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion, and that survival is the subject of a cross-appeal by the hospital. In denying the anti-SLAPP motion, the trial judge noted the obvious: According to Armin, Douglas and Clark attempted to use Armin’s religion against him by imposing on him assignments incompatible with Jewish holidays long prior to any allegations of malpractice made against him. The court thus concluded Armin’s religious discrimination claims do not come within prong one of anti-SLAPP analysis, and hence were not vulnerable to an anti-SLAPP motion. The hospital does not attempt to argue that vexatious scheduling is itself protected activity under section 425.16 – an obviously untenable position. Rather, it argues that because Armin’s claims here are somehow “intertwined” with, the “same