NYC NOW - Midday News: New Year, New Laws, Construction Safety Warnings, and “Imminent Danger” Developments

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Listen to all of our reporting on this topic https://gothamist.com/tags/imminent-danger

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. Happy New Year. Here's your news headlines from Michael Hill. New Year, new laws. New York's statewide hourly minimum wage is now $15.50, but $1.60 in New York City, Westchester County, and Long Island. There are also new penalties for skipping the fare on MTA buses and trains. and starting this weekend, the state DMV will enforce a new penalty point structure for driving violations. Also starting today, New York residents on certain health plans will no longer have co-pays for insulin. Another new law requires private employers to provide paid time off for pregnant New Yorkers to get prenatal care. And another law requires gyms to issue cancellations within 10 days of members' request.

The City Buildings Department is encouraging property. owners and construction companies to secure their buildings, their sites and equipment, and anticipation of high winds. The Department of Building says it will do random spot checks of construction sites across the city and if necessary issue stop orders and other fines. And the MTA says it will not allow empty tractor trailers and tandem trucks on its bridges. It starts at 3 this afternoon till 10 p.m. Thursday due to the high winds. That's the Bronx Whitestone, Cross Bay, Henry Hudson, Marine Parkway, Robert F. Kennedy, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano Narros Bridge. Yes, high winds today. Also, alternate-side parking is suspended. We don't have to pay the parking meters.

50 and cloudy now with a wind advisory later. Some winds up to 55 miles an hour. Slim chance of showers this afternoon, cloudy and 50, the temperatures falling to the mid-40s and gusty. Tomorrow, mostly sunny and 40 beginning a cold stretch. A little over a year ago, we published an investigation into an OBGYN who had been stripped of his medical license in the 90s after a state health department investigation found he'd harmed several patients. His license was later restored in New York, but there's been some recent developments in the story.

We'll dive in after the break. What if you learned your doctor had a long-track record of medical malpractice lawsuits and scrutiny from health officials? How would you even know about that track record? Those are some of the questions at the center of WNYC's podcast series, imminent danger, one doctor, and a trail of injured women, which was just honored with a front page award from the Newswoman's Club of New York. It's an investigation we published back in 2023.

It focused on an OBGYN named Thomas Byr, who was stripped of his medical license in New York in the early 90s after a state health department investigation found he'd harmed several patients, most of them, women, and their newborn babies. But New York restored that medical license in 2014. And last year, he was again being investigated by the state health department. Joining me to talk about a few recent developments in the story is WMYC's investigative editor, Christopher Worth. Christopher, refresh our memory of the story.

Yeah, so in this podcast, the reporter Karen Chakurgy and myself, go back in time to win this doctor, Thomas Byrne, was practicing in upstate New York. And as you say, he was investigated. State health officials found 11 patients had been harmed over a course of two years. Three babies died. There were two others who were left with severe brain damage. And this is where the name of the podcast comes in, imminent danger, because in order to conduct that investigation, state health officials had to declare him an imminent danger to the patients he was treating.

And what we do is chronicle his past. after that license was stripped. What we found is that he went on to New Mexico, he went on to practice in Oklahoma, and he kept accumulating malpractice allegations. There were 24 lawsuits in total that we found. And what we discovered through the course of our reporting is that it is rather easy for a doctor

who loses a medical license to go on and work in another state. And in Burns case, he even got his New York medical license back after he lost it. And so once Byron came back to New York, he treats a woman named Amy Lamb. Tell us about her. Yeah, so Amy was a journalism student who had moved from Hong Kong to New York. She was living in Harlem. And in 2016, she had a baby.

And she gave birth at home. It was kind of by accident. She'd gone to the hospital that she was supposed to give birth at. They said it was too early. She'd gone home. She ended up having the baby there. And at that time, you know, according to the baby there. to the EMS who showed up at her place, she was doing quite well and the baby was doing quite well,

but her placenta had not come out yet. And so they transferred her, they took her to Harlem Hospital. And it was while she was there that the physicians discovered that she had some internal bleeding. And she was treated by Dr. Byrne, who was working at Harlem Hospital at that time and two other physicians there. Dr. Byrne conducted a hysterectomy. And according to the medical notes that we see that was in order to determine where this bleeding was coming from. But doctors could not ultimately stop that bleeding, and Amy died at Harlem Hospital. Her husband later sued, claiming it was a wrongful death, argued that those doctors had made a number of errors and should have done more, actually, to save her.

And over the course of our reporting, I've spoken with staff at Harlem Hospital who were very familiar with this case and told me that other staff members were working. well aware of it. This is something that is talked about at Harlem Hospital because of what happened to Amy. Harlem Hospital did ultimately settle with her husband for $3 million. But while we were reporting this series, he also filed a complaint with what's called the State's Office of Professional Medical Conduct. And what that resulted in was that Byrne and these two other doctors ended up becoming the focus of another investigation by state health officials. So in Burr, By the Burns case, this is a doctor who had been investigated in New York before.

He had lost that license, and now, after the state gave him back that license, he's being investigated again. Yeah, that's right. All right. So what did that second investigation show? I'll start with what we do know, which is not much. Last month, Amy's husband received a letter from the state, notifying him that it had concluded that investigation and that it had found, quote, insufficient evidence of wrongdoing in order to bring charges against any of the doctors involved, and that includes burn. And that means that, you know, it was decided that disciplinary action was not

merited in this case. We know that investigators reviewed records that they conducted interviews with hospital staff, but we don't know what they learned or why the evidence that they had gathered was considered to be insufficient. The state doesn't make that kind of information publicly available when health officials decide not to bring charges. So we can't look at what they learned or know what other members of hospital staff told them. And they don't present that sort of thing to the public. And how is Amy's husband taking that news? He said that he was disappointed, but not surprised. He gave us a statement through his attorney. He also said that he felt that even if Byrne and these other doctors had been disciplined, that they would be able to just go on and practice somewhere else,

as our reporting found. And I think that's really one of the characteristics of our health system that this podcast highlights. There are some serious questions about how much scrutiny doctors face when they're applying for a medical license. And there are also questions over transparency. I think you see that in the fact that we don't know what the state learned in its investigation and why officials made the decision that they did. The system is very protective of doctors.

And as you'll hear in this series, that also plays out in the kinds of information that hospitals do and do not have to share with government oversight bodies that are supposed to be keeping patients safe. Yeah. So, Christopher, looking ahead here, what more can we expect in this case, if anything? You know, I don't think that we can expect much. The state has conducted its investigation. It's closed. And this case in particular is pretty much done and dusted. That's WNYC's investigative editor, Christopher Worth.

Thanks so much, Christopher. Thanks, Jane. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. We'll be back on our regular schedule tomorrow.