How a New Hampshire heart surgeon racked up 21 malpractice settlements
Catholic Medical Center (CMC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, has shared a new report detailing how its leaders failed to address issues with a cardiothoracic surgeon who was involved in 21 different malpractice settlements.
Yvon Baribeau, MD, who retired in 2019 at the age of 63 years old, started working at CMC in 1992. It did not take long for the malpractice cases to start accumulating, as the Boston Globe explored in a thorough investigative report back in September 2022.
“The facts are blunt and chilling: Baribeau has one of the worst surgical malpractice records among all physicians in the United States,” according to the report. “He has settled 21 medical malpractice claims tied to his work at CMC, including 14 in which he is accused of contributing to a patient’s death. There is no U.S. physician with more settlements involving surgical deaths in the last two decades, and no physician in New Hampshire with more settlements of any kind, than Baribeau, according to an analysis of a national physicians’ database that goes back to 1990. Even cardiac surgeons at Boston’s academic medical centers, which take on many of the most challenging cases, come nowhere near Baribeau’s statistics.”
The Boston Globe report led CMC to hire a law firm—Horty, Springer & Mattern—to investigate what, exactly, happened that led to Baribeau accumulating such a troubling record. The firm reviewed more than 300,000 pages of documents and conducted more than 250 hours of interviews during its investigation. Its final 24-page report is now available to the public as a PDF.
The report’s co-authors, Susan Lapenta and Henry Casale, described Baribeau as “highly skilled,” “technically proficient” and “committed to his practice.” Despite these attributes, however, he “rarely accepted responsibility” when confronted with concerns about his judgement or skills” and “seemed to deflect attention away from himself” instead.
The report’s authors also identified key issues with CMC’s senior leadership team and peer review process. Also, they noted, individuals who spoke up about Baribeau seemed to be punished, leading what Lapenta and Casale described as “the perception of a culture of retaliation.”
“As noted throughout the report, the greatest failure at CMC was not bad faith, malicious intent, or inappropriate motives,” the authors concluded. “Rather, the greatest failure was the lack of trust and the lack of respect that hardened over time among the various leaders at CMC. Trust and respect cannot be demanded of others. Trust and respect must be earned, over time, and will flow organically from relationships that are candid, authentic and integrity based.”
Michael has more than 18 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.