NYC NOW - October 10, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is getting rid of a rule that forces some tenants to complete a credit check before renting an apartment through a housing lottery. Plus, there’s a divide between New York Democrats in the wake of Hamas' deadly attack on Israel. And finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with editor Christopher Werth about the new investigative podcast series “Imminent Danger: One Doctor and a Trail of Injured Women.”

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news and and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is getting rid of a rule that forces tenants with rental assistance vouchers to complete a credit check before renting an apartment through the city's housing lottery. Adam says the requirement locks people out of affordable apartments because of their credit scores, even though a government subsidy covers their rent. Officials with the Department of Housing Preservation and Department of Housing Preservation and development, say the rule change clears a financial hurdle for more than 4,000 families with

rental vouchers, like Section 8. Hamas' attack on Israel is further exposing an already frayed relationship between two factions of New York's Democratic Party. WMYC's John Campbell has more. On one side is the party's more moderate leaders, like Governor Kathy Hochel and Chairman Jay Jacobs. They're big supporters of Israel. On the other is the party's left flank, including some members of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. It helped promote a pro-Palestine

rally in Times Square on Sunday, which drew widespread condemnation from Hockel, who called it, quote, abhorrent and morally repugnant. DSA members include Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. She did not attend the rally, but she issued a statement calling for an immediate ceasefire between

Israel and Hamas, which Israel and many of its supporters, reject. Stay close. After the break, we'll discuss WMYC's new investigative podcast series Eminent Danger. The first episode dropped over the weekend, so check it out if you haven't already. It's a good one. We'll be right back. Our new investigative podcast series Eminent Danger tells the story of one OBGYN working with a practice in New York City and how that doctor regained his medical license in New York 23 years after the state revoked it due to a string of injuries and deaths among the patients he cared for. My colleague Sean Carlson talks with WNYC's investigative editor Christopher Worth about the podcast and the story behind it.

Episode one dropped over the weekend. I listened to it, and I got to say it is sad. What we learn along the way is that New York health officials conducted an investigation into this doctor. His name is Thomas J. Byrne. what did the state find? Yeah, so in 1990, so going back a few decades, New York State declared this doctor to be, quote, an imminent danger to patients. And that was after health officials had started to look into a number of cases involving his patients. And these were mostly pregnant women and their newborn babies. At the time, he was practicing in a small upstate community or communities near Rochester, New York.

The state concluded that five infants had been injured, three died, as the result of what a medical expert hired by the state concluded was gross negligence and gross incompetence. And New York, as you say, revoked his medical license. But what the reporting in the podcast shows is that Byrne was able to get another medical license about a year later in another state. He went on to New Mexico and then he went to Oklahoma. and he's been named as a defendant in at least 23 medical malpractice lawsuits in those states, and he's been subject to, at times, restrictions on his license and his hospital privileges. But what's remarkable is that in 2014, New York restored his medical license, and he's been practicing in New York City.

He currently works at a clinic run by St. Barnabas Health in the Bronx, and until rather recently he was working at Harlem Hospital. where he's also been named as a defendant in two lawsuits. Yeah, so this first episode tells a story of one of those patients at Harlem Hospital, Amy Lamb. Can you tell us about her? Yeah, Amy was from Hong Kong. Her name was Waichi Lam. People called her Amy.

She moved to New York City to study journalism at Columbia University's graduate program. And actually, I have an excerpt of the episode that picks up her story from there that I'd like to play. So just to set this up a little bit, this is me in conversation. with the reporter on this series. Her name is Karen Chikurgy. And just a quick warning, this story is about a medical emergency, and it is a little difficult to hear.

Okay. Okay. Let's take a listen. Karen, what exactly happened to this woman, Amy Lamb, whose case you've been looking into? Yeah, so in 2016, she was pregnant with her second child when the plan she had for the birth

got completely derailed. My cases all have an effect on me, but this one particularly because my daughter just gave birth. And for a few months, I couldn't even open the pages of the case because it gave me such a bad feeling. I spoke with Susan Carton. She's an attorney in New York who specializes in medical malpractice cases. And she represented Amy's family in a lawsuit.

She explained to me that Amy really wanted to stay in New York so she could have her second kid here. because it was her belief that the medical care was better in New York City than anywhere. Where in New York was Amy supposed to have her baby? She was supposed to go to Beth Israel downtown in the city, and she goes there when she feels like she's in labor, but they tell her that she's not far along enough, and she heads back to her apartment.

But then things moved pretty quickly. All of a sudden, she felt the baby coming. And she ended up giving birth at home. She got on the floor of the bathroom and she delivered this child. And the neighbor came in. The neighbor helped and thank God everything was fine. The baby came out. Amy was fine.

However, they wanted somebody to cut the umbilical card. So her husband called EMS. And EMS showed up pretty quickly. They wrote down in all their records that she was alert and what we call alert times three. She was talking. She was smiling. She was taking pictures of the baby.

She had done a selfie with her husband. The only issue was that the placenta hadn't come out. So EMS asks her husband what turned out to be a pivotal question. EMS said, we can take you to two hospitals. We can take you either to Columbia or we can take you to Harlem. And her husband said, which one? is closer. And they said Harlem, so that's where they ended up. So what happened when Amy got to Harlem Hospital? So the doctors there do eventually get the placenta out. But at some point around

2 p.m., her blood pressure started to drop. There were red flags going off. Her blood pressure was dropping. Her heart rate was increasing. And she was getting. And she was getting. getting weaker and weaker. It is really a tragic story. But Christopher, what is the bigger picture here in the story you're telling? Yeah, I think many listeners will be surprised to learn that a doctor in New York can lose their medical license under the tragic circumstances that this doctor did. And then, one, rather quickly go on to practice in another state.

And two, get that medical license back in New York. many of us probably presume that there are protections in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening as a way to ensure patient safety. So what we've set out to do is not only tell the story of this one doctor, but also tell the story of the systems that are in place to vet doctors, to track doctors when they harm patients, and uncover the shortcomings in those systems. So we talk about the role that state medical boards play, for example, in licensing doctors. and what responsibility they have to make sure physicians don't pose a risk to patients. And we also look at the loopholes that exist within a system that Congress had set up over 30 years ago to better track doctors that do move from state to state and hospital to hospital. And we get into all of that in later episodes.

And as you do say in the story, you made many attempts to try and reach this doctor and get his side of the story, right? Yeah, that's right. We tried to reach Dr. Byrne by phone, by text and email, by certified mail. He went to the clinic where he works in the Bronx. He sees patients there largely remotely, we're told. He also works at Texas Tech Physicians in Amarillo, Texas. And even one of our staff members went there. He was there that day, but he did decline to speak with us. That's WMYC's investigative editor, Christopher Worth, talking with my colleague, Sean Carlson.

You can find a minute danger right here in the NYC Now podcast feed. New episodes will be released every Saturday morning for the next four weeks. Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. We'll be back tomorrow.