The former medical director of the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine has sued the agency and its executive director in federal court alleging he illegally fired her after Northern Light Health said it did not want her involved in any of its cases.
Dr. Brenda A. Gowesky, 68, of Alexandria, Virginia, and formerly Camden, previously worked as an emergency room physician at Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center.
In May 2017, she was fired after 10 years on the job, the complaint said. The following January, Gowesky filed a claim with the Maine Human Rights Commission alleging that she was fired after reporting concern about patient safety in the emergency room of the Bangor hospital.
That claim was pending when she was hired by the board in October 2019. The matter was settled through mediation.
Gowesky allegedly received praise from the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine’s executive director, Dennis E. Smith, in November and December 2019. That changed in January 2020 when a representative from Northern Light Health told the board that it did not want Gowesky handling any cases involving the physicians employed at its 10 hospitals.
The letter sent to the board from Northern Light Health said that the organization had “lost confidence in Dr. Gowesky’s ability to be fair, objective and unbiased when it comes to providers in the NLH system” because of the pending whistleblower complaint, the lawsuit said. Smith allegedly objected to Northern Light Health’s demand but apparently acquiesced the following month.
That is when Gowesky received her three-month job performance review a month later than expected. The review included negative comments for the first time and was meant to force the doctor to resign, the complaint alleged.
The lawsuit claims that Smith consulted with the board’s human resources director who advised him to give Gowesky another three months to work out any possible job performance problems. Instead, the doctor was fired on March 5, 2020, and criticized for not being a team player, the complaint said.
Gowesky’s attorney, David Webbert of Topsham, said that the doctor’s lawsuit is an example of how much influence a large health care organization like Northern Light Health can wield.
“It’s a huge monopoly,” Webbers said of the organization. “It’s a tough situation for any doctor who gets on the wrong side of Northern Light.”
Gowesky, who has been the head of five emergency departments, began her medical career in emergency medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, according to Webbert. She spent 10 years as a medical officer in the U.S. Air Force and served overseas in three conflicts, including Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. She coordinated the triage processes at two of the larger military hospitals transferring injured troops back to Germany from the conflict zone in the Middle East.
The doctor was working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Webbert said. Gowesky, her husband and two children lost their family home and everything in it.
She went to work at Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in 2007, according to her attorney. When she was fired, Gowesky was coordinating staffing at four of Northern Light Health’s hospitals.
Gowesky is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages from the state.
The Maine attorney general’s office, which defends state agencies in litigation, declined to comment. It is the practice of the attorney general not to comment on pending cases.
In June 2016, Gowesky received a promotion with the additional responsibilities of overseeing collaboration between the EMMC emergency department and the emergency departments of four other hospitals in the Eastern Maine Health System (Blue Hill Memorial Hospital, Inland Hospital, Maine Coast Memorial Hospital, and Sebasticook Valley Health), and overseeing the medical care and physician staffing in the emergency departments of EMMC, Blue Hill and Inland. Gowesky was tasked with developing a new program called the EMMC ED Collaborative Group, integrating the physician staffing for all four hospitals.
The lawsuit was filed June 2 in U.S. District Court in Bangor.
