Don't get sick in Seattle

And now it seems that another Seattle hospital fired an employee hired for the purpose of reviewing surgeon's performances. The Seattle Times again:

Swedish halts ex-employee from airing work details
Swedish Medical Center has obtained a court order to keep a former employee from publicly discussing his belief that the hospital's program for detecting medical mistakes is "fatally flawed."

The former employee, Riccardo Spurgeon, was fired by the Seattle medical center July 29. He had been hired three weeks earlier to review cases in which patients or health-care providers had raised questions about a surgeon's performance.

Swedish has not explained why it fired Spurgeon except to say in court papers that his "performance was not consistent with Swedish's expectations of employees."

Spurgeon, in his own court declaration, alleges he was dismissed after he raised concerns about a specific "incident" and expressed his surprise that "the general public was not privy" to the information.

When told he was being fired, Spurgeon threatened to go to the news media with his concerns, court records show. Immediately, the medical center hand-delivered a letter to him, warning that he had signed a confidentiality agreement. Swedish said the agreement prohibited him from inappropriately disclosing information about his work to a third party.

Swedish lawyers went to court Aug. 1 and obtained a temporary restraining order barring Spurgeon from talking about his work for the medical center.

Fired after only three weeks? Spurgeon either did something horribly stupid, lied about his resume or uncovered something that the Swedish management didn't want brought to light. A bit more:

"I have been concerned that the Peer Review process at Swedish is inadequate and fatally flawed," he wrote in his declaration. "I have considered making referrals to appropriate state and federal regulatory agencies."