Doctors: Protected Profession
Christmas Eve will never be the same for Deborah Saeed Gay.
That’s the day her son, 10-year-old Isaiah, passed away.
Sadly, in the nearly five years since his death, not much has changed in Colorado’s lax laws regarding physician oversight.
Isaiah was taken to the ER at Swedish Hospital in Denver. He was having trouble breathing. Instead of receiving breathing treatments — or even being admitted — Isaiah was discharged within 90 minutes of arriving at the ER, and given a prescription for Tamiflu. Fifteen minutes later at the drug store, Isaiah fell to the floor: his throat had collapsed. EMTs couldn’t revive him. He died a day later in his mother’s arms.
“It was most definitely malpractice,” said Saeed Gay.
“He basically got a doctor who ignored what was going on,” said David Woodruff, Saeed Gay’s lawyer.
The family and lawyers could not mention the doctors name; however, publically-filed documents reveal it was Dr. Jenna Greenfield who discharged Isaiah.
Saeed Gay sued the hospital, and Dr. Greenfield — but even the lawsuit itself did little to unearth a larger problem.
A co-worker of Dr. Greenfield called Woodruff, having seen the story on the news, to tell him about Dr. Greenfield’s checkered past regarding illicit drug use.
“A whistleblower within the hospital heard about the lawsuit and called me privately, and said, ‘You need to look into this doctor’s drug history because she is a drug addict.'”
Records showed Greenfield had been arrested for trying to smuggle in drugs from Mexico while in medical school.
Greenfield eventually admitted cocaine use in the years before and after seeing Isaiah, but claimed she did not use cocaine in 2014, the year Isaiah died.
Greenfield was ultimately terminated later from a different hospital, SkyRidge, after being suspected of smoking marijuana.
Problems Within
Doctors practicing while high is not uncommon. According to the Journal of Addiction Medicine, 69% of doctors use and abuse prescription drugs like painkillers and antidepressants, as a way of coping with the stress of the job. The study, did not include illegal drug use.
Despite this fact, most hospitals do not randomly drug test medical professionals. Only in the cases of “reasonable suspicion” is an employee subjected to a drug or alcohol test.
Likewise, the state of Colorado, does not embark on testing.
The closest oversight would be the self-policing arm within the medical profession, called Peer Review. It allows co-workers to issue complaints, but those complaints are never made public.
That’s exactly what happened in the case of Dr. Jenna Greenfield.
“The peer review process, what it did was allow her to keep working. Because the discussions about her problems were not public. No one knew about them. And therefore, there was nothing wrong with keeping her there,” said Woodruff.
Problems Still Exist
Greenfield’s state record shows her license as ‘Expired’ and absent of any disciplinary actions, as is the case for many other physcian records.
The closest transparency for patients in Colorado might be the state’s list of “drug diversions,” a collection of instances where prescription drugs have been listed missing. KRDO NewsChannel 13 obtained all records from Colorado hospitals over the last three years; however, names of physicians are excluded, by regulation, in the compilation of data.
See list of Drug Diversions here: 
