A brief word of advice to Parkland and UT Southwestern. It's time to throw back the curtains and let in some sunlight. Drag all the skeletons from the closet. All of them, even those gruesomely deformed ones stuffed in the back. Put them where passersby can take a good long look. Blush. Act contrite.Then go back to pointing at your shiny new hospital.
That's the only way to get the sordid failures that have defined the institutions for the past several years behind you. Fighting The Dallas Morning News' voluminous open records requests 1) makes it look like you have something to hide and 2) just prolongs the embarrassment.
Case in point: Today, DMN investigative guy Brooks Egerton has a lengthy blog post detailing a 2011 visit by a British penis surgeon named Aivar Bracka, who delivered a lecture at UT Southwestern.
Bracka's story would have gotten ink regardless of when Egerton obtained the documents. He's a penis surgeon who admitted to exposing himself to patients. No modern-day journalist would pass up on the opportunity to write passages like this about a penis surgeon:
His license was revoked in late 2010, with regulators finding that he performed sexual acts on or in the presence of five adolescent boys and a young man.Bracka, 64, has denied any wrongdoing. But British regulatory records say he admitted exposing himself to a "small number of patients."
He did this under the guise of showing them how they would look and function after surgery, according to regulators, and then initiated sexual encounters -- usually masturbation, but also oral sex in one case. "Bracka has shown little insight into the gravity of his actions," the regulators wrote.
In the context of all the things that were happening at UTSW at the time, however, Bracka's role is minor. He lectured for four days at Children's Medical Center and may have seen a patient or two in the company of other doctors. While doctors attending the lectures were concerned by his easily Google-able license revocation and frequent comments about "good looking penises" and "screw[ing] anybody and anything," there does not seem to have been any actual misconduct.
A humongous lapse in judgment, to be sure, and one that got the head of UTSW's pediatric urology department demoted for extending the invitation, but it's minor in comparison to the stories of dead patients, contaminated vaginal equipment and a doctor who was sexually assaulting patients and telling them they looked like Julia Roberts.
Had UTSW gone ahead and released the information about Bracka's visit, it would have gotten lost in the shuffle. Alone, a story about a penis surgeon exposing himself to young boys sticks out like a sore, er ... thumb.
