Oregon DOC Replaces Top Medical Staffers Amid Turmoil
On February 25, 2025, less than half of the physician positions budgeted for the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) were staffed. Ten doctors had resigned, been fired or put on leave in the previous year. The decimation of the physician workforce was followed by changes at the top, throwing into turmoil the healthcare of the DOC’s 12,000 prisoners.
The agency’s remaining nine doctors were left scurrying to oversee nearly 600 subordinate medical staffers, trying to keep some 500 daily prisoner healthcare appointments. Attorney Dave Boyer with Disability Rights Oregon blamed the problems on “turmoil at the top.” Four of the departing doctors also took parting shots at then-Chief of Medicine Dr. Warren Roberts or his boss, DOC Health Services Assistant Director Joe Bugher.
One doctor who was sent home for challenging Roberts’ competence took his concerns to the Corrections Ombudsman. Three gynecologists were sidelined after clashes with Roberts, who demanded that one examine male patients, which was outside of her training. Another was sanctioned with reassignment to the prison mailroom.
Roberts was fired on February 4, 2025, along with Bugher. DOC Director Mike Reese replaced him with DOC Deputy Director Heidi Steward after a report from an outside consultant, Falcon Correctional and Community Services, faulted the two ousted medical leaders for failed leadership that left the system in tatters.
Meanwhile, the doctors who were placed on leave cost DOC $1 million in 2024, according to an analysis by The Oregonian, which also identified the three disciplined gynecologists as Coffee Creek Correctional Facility (CCCF) Drs. Lauren Prewitt and Linda Widing and Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) Dr. Cameron Wilson.
Widing was fired for refusing to perform exams on male prisoners. Prewitt was sent to work in the mailroom for objecting when Roberts refused to provide medication to suppress the genital herpes virus in prisoners. Instead, the prisoners were subjected to multiple exams, and the facility waited for them to suffer a painful outbreak before providing treatment. Before Prewitt was finally returned to work in December 2024, the 870 women incarcerated at CCCF had no gynecologist to see them.
Wilson compiled a list of medical standards violations and took them to then-Ombudsman Adrian Wulff, who said that Reese brushed it off as “just a personnel matter.” Roberts then reopened a prisoner’s closed grievance about Wilson and put him on leave when the prisoner filed a tort claim notice. Attorney Jill Goldsmith, hired by the state Justice Department to investigate, found that “Bugher and Roberts shaped both the medical opinion process and the tort claim to cast Wilson in a more negative light.” Nevertheless, he was put on leave and had not returned to CRCI as of late February 2025.
Even before Goldsmith was hired in May 2024, Wulff warned Gov. Tina Kotek (D) that “[t]he harm being caused and the cost to Oregon taxpayers is too significant for me to remain silent” about the prison medical system’s problematic culture. He got no reply, he said. Wulff was then fired in November 2024, when Kotek said he failed to review correspondence from prisoners, among other alleged performance failures. She appointed her director of constituent services, Kristina Rice-Whitlow, to serve as acting Ombudsman before making the appointment permanent beginning in March 2025.
Sources: The Oregonian, Statesman-Journal
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