A 62-year-old doctor from South Florida has lost his medical license after letting a mother bleed to death following a complicated delivery as he ‘needed to go home’ to change and get some rest.
Dr. Berto Lopez had been practicing obstetrics and gynecology for 38 years.
His career, which was stained by a botched pregnancy termination and the deaths of two new mothers, finally came to an end when he has been stripped of his license.
Administrative hearing judge Robert Cohen said that Lopez made numerous mistakes the day Onystei Castillo tragically died in 2017.
He left the patient in critical condition at Good Samaritan Hospital as he claimed that his scrubs were drenched in blood and he did not bring any clean clothes at the hospital.
Lopez went home and left the bleeding patient in the care of a nurse, an anesthesiologist, and an ICU doctor who was only available via telemedicine, Miami Herald reported.
The 40-year-old mother went into a cardiac arrest and died at home.
Cohen said that Lopez’s decision to go home and sleep “was where his failure to complete his care for his patient, led, ultimately to her untimely death.”
The judge also added that had the doctor returned to the hospital after changing his scrubs, he might’ve saved the mother.
“Perhaps, his patient still would not have survived, but we will never know that because [Lopez] left her to go home,” Cohen added.
The Florida Board of Medicine stripped Lopez of his license.
At the time of the mother’s death, Lopez was under a settlement agreement with state health officials to not perform surgeries without supervision due to the death of another patient after a C-section in 2014.
Lopez’s record also includes another settlement related to a woman whose baby died in the uterus. The doctor failed to remove all of the contents of her uterus and the patient ended up delivering the remains of her unborn child in the bathroom a month later.
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