Marie-Louise Fitrion claims that she was lying in a medical sleep when she noticed a finger in her womb. It was Oct. 25, 2018, the day of giving birth to her second child, and she says it triggered the recollection of being romantically assaulted as a child. In response to Dr. Park’s resignation from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario ( CPSO ) on April 30 and the restriction on her license to office-based gynecology on December 17, 2024, Fitrion is sharing her experience with that doctor, Esther Park. The school investigated Park’s training for “infection power issues” after Toronto Public Health found health instruments were not properly cleaned, disinfected and sterilized at her doctor. Since then, past people have come to The Canadian Press with allegations that include aggressive and improper care, both at her Toronto department on 20 Edna Ave., and at a west-end doctor, St. Joseph’s Health Centre, commonly referred to as St. Joe’s. Some patients, who were undergoing labor and aggressive procedures like biopsies and contraception insertions, spoke to The Canadian Press about their traumatizing encounters with Park. At the time, none of the people filed official complaints. These patients claimed they were dealing with health issues like postpartum depression, cancer, and post-traumatic tension and weren’t in a position to initiate a problem process, just like Fitrion, who claimed she was in “another world of pain and suffering.” ” I’ve always regretted never reporting it officially”, Fitrion said. After centuries of thought, she just did just that. Given that some physician concerns date up nearly a decade, the patients believe governmental bodies, including the university and people health, have not properly monitored Park’s practice. Patients also problem a program that places the onus on them to review and demonstrate harm. Some people recently requested an independent assessment of regulatory bodies in a letter to state officials. While they said the state dismissed the idea, Toronto Public Health told The Canadian Press it may do an inner assessment. In a resignation notice posted on the CPSO site in April, Park acknowledged that two common problems prompted an inspection by the school into her exercise. She resigned after that research was concluded. It was not shared with the public, nor were the essence of the problems. Doctors who mark these kinds of agreements won’t be able to return for their licenses in the future, according to Mickey Cirak, a communications director at the college. Cirak said doctors are expected to abide by relevant laws, CPSO procedures and medical instructions. ” In common, college researchers may only enter a concept as part of an active research”, he said. North of Toronto-based health malpractice attorney Paul Harte believes that the findings of the investigation may be made public. The school messages if a doctor’s permission is restricted or revoked on its site, but it does not express why it happened. Similar to how franchises are monitored on a regular basis, according to Harte. ” That’s the kind of strategic assessment system that I think needs to be put in place for doctors who are engaged in aggressive processes”, Harte said. Attempts to reach Park for post at her business on three times, by email, and by telephone were not effective. On April 16, her answering equipment stopped accepting information. Fitrion said she went to St. Joe’s with unexpected bruising about a month shy of her due date. The doctor overnighted her and induced her due to problems with her first pregnancy. She went to sleep with a murphy needle bubble inserted to physically widen her womb. Fitrion said she woke up to Park’s side up her doctor dress. Fitrion remarked,” There was no consent.” ” Given I have a sexual assault past it was more challenging for me to deal with that degree of neglect”. When Fitrion asked what Park was doing, she said the doctor said she was checking the catheter’s position, and continued to do so, pulling it out of her womb and breaking Fitrion’s waters without warning, nor explanation. She recalled inconsolable sobbing in a hospital bed and saying,” I just went into hysterics.” Her husband, Daniel Holloway, had gone home to sleep. ” I should have been there”, he said, regret still ripe in his voice. Asking a patient for permission before an examination is common practice in medicine. It’s especially necessary when doing the vaginal examination of a sexual assault or domestic abuse survivor, said Dr. Naila Ramji, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Fredericton and assistant professor in obstetrics and gynecology with a cross-appointment in the department of bioethics at Dalhousie University. Ramji, who has no connection to Park, said that the patient must be aware and able to consent, and that he only speaks about standards of care in medicine and not specific allegations. She said spelling out exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it is key to leaving little room for misunderstanding, misinterpretation and re-traumatization for a patient. On May 14, Fitrion filed a CPSO patient complaint. She continued,” It’s symbolic,” adding that all she wants to know is what happened to her. ” I don’t want to have to hold on to this story by myself. Fitrion says,” I want to put it out there and I want to let it go.” She mimed off-loading a weight from her shoulder that she said felt like a boulder. ” It feels like I’ve been holding my breath for seven years. No infections have been linked to Park’s practices, according to Dr. Herveen Sachdeva, the city’s associate medical officer of health. In March, Toronto Public Health sent a letter to 2, 500 of her patients warning they may have been exposed to blood-borne viruses, including HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C. Sachdeva said the public health unit’s investigation is independent of the college, and that it is still active, solely to followup on lab results, of which they had received 563 as of May 29. She added that the public health unit’s response will be subject to an internal review by TPH to “identify lessons learned” and “apply them to upcoming investigations.” Sachdeva also stated that the public health unit is working with the ministry of health and other public health units in the province to “review and strengthen our collective approach” to managing infection prevention and control lapses in medical settings. TPH said it was notified of a patient complaint in September 2024 and launched an investigation in October. Inspectors found medical instruments were not disassembled before they were cleaned at Park’s clinic, and disinfecting solution had been significantly overdiluted. Similar to the CPSO, Sachdeva claimed that they don’t regularly inspect health care facilities unless a complaint is made. In January, Park sent a notice to patients saying she was retiring and that her practice would close at the end of April. I’m appreciative of the trust you have placed in me over the years and for allowing me to take part in your medical care. With mixed emotions, I am announcing my plans to retire”, Park said in the letter dated Jan. 23, 2025. In March, a sign on the front door of a red brick house on Edna Avenue said:” Doctor’s office closed “.A woman who identified herself as Park’s secretary opened the locked door and said she could not provide comment. The Canadian Press has not heard back about the contact information they provided. Inside, plastic chairs lined an empty waiting room that several patients said was at times so crowded that they had to wait outside. The window shutters were closed, and the lights were dimmed. Contraception brochures in plastic display cases sat on a window ledge. The doctor’s office sign was gone by mid-May and a for-lease sign was planted in the lawn. The windowsill had no brochures on it, and the shutters had broken open. That month, The Canadian Press mailed a letter to Park, which was redirected to another address, and left another in her mailbox but did not receive a response. Both the CPSO and Unity Health Toronto said they were unable to respond to the request or share it with anyone. According to the CPSO’s website, Park obtained her medical degree from the University of Toronto in 1993, and specialized in obstetrics and gynecology in 1998. Unity Health said she started working in obstetrics at St. Joe’s in 1999 before transitioning to gynecology and surgeries. According to its website, the college gave her permission to open her own clinic in 2006. After 25 years of service, Park stopped practising at St. Joe’s in July 2024 and resigned in December. The legal representative for medical malpractice, Harte, claimed Unity Health has a duty to the patients being treated in its facilities. ” It’s absolutely incumbent upon a hospital to regularly assess the quality of care being provided to the patients at that hospital, including the quality of care provided by the physicians that they grant privileges to”, Harte said. He said quality assurance auditing should indicate if there is a systemic issue with a physician. When they don’t be transparent, all it does is stifle the trust of patients in our system of public health care. They also would not say if the hospital launched its own investigation but said Unity Health has “rigorous processes” in place to provide “high quality, compassionate care “.They encouraged anyone with concerns to reach out to their patient experience office. Patients urged speaking with Ontario’s Patient Ombudsman Craig Thompson in March, which the CPSO declined to disclose. Thompson also would not disclose if Park’s patients reached out due to privacy considerations. He said his office can get involved if a patient is not satisfied with the hospital’s response to a complaint, and they’ll try and help the parties reach a resolution, but ultimately the hospital bears the responsibility for the patient’s experience. In the wake of the ombudsman’s most recent annual report, the number of obstetrics and gynecology related complaints increased significantly across the province, citing health professionals ‘ inability to provide trauma-informed care for pregnancy complications, miscarriages, difficult births, and sexual assaults. Some complaints were about serious incidents in which severe pain was ignored or dismissed, the report says. ” We make sure we report that,” We want to make sure people understand what it is we are seeing. What is driving that is really something for the system to try to understand. We report on it, and then it’s really up to the various organizations and providers to assess how that might manifest in their circumstances,” Thompson said. It wasn’t until Alejandra Sinnett returned home and showered after the birth of her daughter that she understood the severity of incisions made during delivery May 12, 2016. The cuts extended from her upper genital area to the back of her anus. The size came as a shock, as did the searing pain when she walked and urinated. ” I started bawling”, she said, adding that she was scared to touch her own body. After giving birth, Sinnett said she realized she had an episiotomy. Dr. Glenn Posner, vice chair of education for the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Ottawa, said an incision of this nature would be considered an extension of an episiotomy into a fourth degree tear, which he said he’s only seen twice in his career of more than 20 years. Posner, who has no connection to Park, said,” You wouldn’t intentionally insert an episiotomy into the anus.” He said painkillers and stool softeners would be given to patients in these cases. After more than 12 hours in labour with her 9.5-pound, late-term baby, Sinnett remembers Park saying,” I’m just going to cut you a bit, OK” ?Sinnett says she said,” OK”, and her husband, Nickolas Sinnett, who was in the room, adds:” There was no explanation” .He recalls blood covering the floor, the bed, the doctors, like” a murder scene in a horror film”.Afterwards, he said his wife spiralled into depression. The lack of communication, according to Sinnett, was especially challenging because it echoed elements of abuse she had experienced in a prior relationship. ” It’s the chaos. When you have no other choice, it’s the case as a survivor of domestic abuse. When you’re in that situation, you don’t have a lot of choices. It’s whatever the person says, the abuser, the abuser’s in control. And it made me feel very vulnerable. It felt like my choices were being taken away from me just like they were when I was in that situation”, she said. At prenatal appointments, she claimed to have disclosed her history of domestic abuse to Park. But in the end, she said,” I was completely neglected. Like completely neglected” .Sinnett said no one at the hospital came back to check on her stitches or instruct her how to manage them. She discovered the infection at a postpartum appointment with Park a few weeks later. She was prescribed antibiotics and told to wear skirts. Why weren’t we given any of that information when we left the hospital? We would have done all of those things before”, her husband said. Trending Now
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There might not be as much time for a quiet and calm conversation about consent in urgent circumstances, such as those when an episiotomy is required to get a baby out quickly, Ramji said, talking generally about the procedure. ” But usually you say,’ I need to make a cut for the baby’s head to come out more easily.’ You kind of do like an abridged version of:’ This is what I need to do. Do you grant me permission to do it? ‘”” You typically don’t just do it “.It’s also the law, said Toronto-based lawyer Jordan Assaraf. Sixteen of Park’s patients have emailed him, he claims. ” You require patient consent for any medical procedure … a patient who’s asleep and then woken up with a doctor inside of her – where’s the consent”? He said informed consent includes conveying the full extent of a procedure, and the potential options available to a patient. And he said it’s always required, even in emergencies when there may be little time for discussion. Sinnett has never complained to the patient. ” This goes back to being a domestic abuse survivor. She continued,” I didn’t report that person either.” ” I felt very small in the situation… like I was too small to deal with someone so big”.Claudia Gomez went to Park for a Pap test in 2020, less than a year after she moved to Canada from Colombia. She had fibroids, growths in her uterus, and menstrual bleeding so heavy that she couldn’t work when she had her period. The test was lengthy and painful. When Gomez asked why, she said Park told her it was because she did a biopsy. The 48-year-old recalls saying,” But you didn’t tell me,” and Park retorted in silence. When doctors see something suspicious during a Pap smear, they may want to do a biopsy, Ramji said. But the risks, benefits, complications and alternatives should be clearly communicated. When Jenny McIntyre spoke with Gomez, a former client who later became a friend, she recalls being the executive director of Romero House, a nonprofit that provides transitional housing and support to refugee claimants at the time. ” I remember just listening to her, and hearing, and feeling so terrible for that experience because women’s health is very personal, it can be very scary. Therefore, it’s one of the most crucial areas to receive really good care, according to McIntyre. Gomez said she never filed a patient complaint. ” I was just trying to forget about her, about the situation “.In Colombia she said her experience would be called “gynecologist violence”. It seems as though the dignity of women was violated and they were treated unfairly. And it is why I feel violated “.It’s been just over a year since 58-year-old Esther Arbeid says she’s felt like herself. At St. Joe’s, Park removed her ovaries and Fallopian tubes on March 21, 2024. Arbeid said she was told it would be a routine laparoscopic surgery involving three small incisions of the same size. She says she was released the same day and given a handout about taking care of the incision and pain management, with no further aftercare discussed. In contrast to the others, who were all about a centimeter long, Arbeid claimed she discovered a 4 12 centimeter-long incision on her right side when she got home. The Canadian Press viewed a post-operative photo of Arbeid’s incisions, showing the one on her right side sizably bigger than her left. She recalls thinking,” That looks like open surgery to me.” Her mother, Norma Rose, who was with her the day of the surgery, also said the scar that marked the right side of her daughter’s body did not look laparoscopic. ” We go to a doctor, particularly a surgeon, with this huge amount of trust. And that confidence was shattered,” Rose said. Posner, the Ottawa physician, said an incision of that size suggests there may have been complications. According to best practices from the Canadian Medical Protective Association, a doctor is required to make unanticipated outcomes known to a patient. ” People understand that doctors are human and then they’re making difficult decisions. People understand that complications happen, but they don’t like when they get the sense that people are avoiding them”, Posner said. He said he always says,” If there’s a patient you don’t want to go see after undergoing surgery or postpartum, that’s the first patient you should go see.” Arbeid claimed that she left three tearful voicemails at Park’s clinic over a 10-day period, pleading with her for assistance. She was in too much pain to walk and could only shuffle her legs. I detested crying messages on a doctor’s answering machine. I hated it. It made me feel infantilized, ignored”, she said. Arbeid claimed that Park eventually called her back and that she had forgotten the incisions were larger than usual. She says the pain on her right side persisted through the summer, and eventually, after visiting her family doctor in October 2024, she learned she had an incisional hernia, requiring another surgery. An incisional specialist was scheduled to operate on Arbeid’s her hernia on March 19, 2025, according to an email Arbeid received from Shouldice Hospital that The Canadian Press reviewed. Weeks before Arbeid’s second procedure, she filled out a CPSO patient complaint form saying she felt ghosted, gaslit and ignored, but she never filed it. Friends, family and colleagues advised her to focus on her health. Her mother said that she had to take the time to focus on her recovery and just come up to her surgery appointment. ” The first priority is always maintaining and guarding your health” .Zahra Bakhsh said she found out in September that her IUD was” just floating around” after Park inserted it at her clinic in July 2024. The 44-year-old claims that after an exam, another gynecologist in nearby Mississauga, Ontario, made the discovery while her IUD was stuck in his glove. Ramji said IUDs can move from their initial position, and even fall out if they’ve migrated low enough. A study published in Obstetrics &, Gynecology in 2023 found that the overall risk of IUD expulsion is five per cent. Since then, Bakhsh has spent a lot of time pondering who should have been in charge of treating patients like her. She sent a letter on April 28 to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and almost 30 other politicians with another patient, Karin Martin, who had three biopsies with Park last spring and summer before she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Martin claimed that Park had already stopped performing surgery at Unity Health in July, putting a hold on an urgent procedure she had to undergo in September with a different surgeon. Bakhsh and Martin questioned whether Park’s resignation at about the same time that she had planned to retire held her fully accountable. ” We need to understand whether this was an isolated regulatory lapse or indicative of a systemic problem in how patient complaints are handled in Ontario”, they state in the letter. Ford, the only politician to respond, sent Bakhsh an email on April 30. For a split second, she said she got excited. By the time I reached the second line, I was astonished. I was like, this has got to be a joke”, she said. The email thanked her for sharing her views and said that the letter would be shared with the minister of health. In the email that Ford signed, Ford said,” I appreciate the opportunity to read your comments and learn more about your point of view.” ” Your input is important. The Ministry of Health told The Canadian Press that it hoped to take this into account when making decisions regarding the various issues that the country was currently facing. Martin also noted that the health minister had criticized the health minister’s decision to stick by the current system. ” Clearly, that does not work”.Martin said this situation should serve as a wake-up call. In the letter, they say,” It underscores the importance of vigilant medical regulation and the grave consequences when that vigilance falters. When our trust is revoked on such a scale, it shakes the public’s faith in the entire system. We entrust our doctors with our health and confidence.
