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'Doctor Death' still in Portland: Sleuths
Reporters held a vigil outside the doctor's house, but so far there have been no sightings of him in Portland.
A disgraced doctor wanted in Australia for allegedly botching dozens of operations probably is still in Portland, two detectives from Australia announced.
"Our intelligence suggests he is," Graham Walker, a detective sergeant with the homicide division of the Queensland Police Service, said on Wednesday.
Dr Jayant Patel, an India-born doctor who has a house in Portland, has been the focus of a heated inquiry in Australia, where a clinical audit discovered that during his two year stint at a rural hospital, he contributed to the deaths of eight of the 88 patients who died under his watch.
The audit concluded that the deaths at the Bundaberg Base Hospital were a result of an "unacceptable level of care."
Earlier this summer, Australian officials travelled to Portland to publicly ask Patel to voluntarily return to Queensland to face an inquiry into his surgeries. Reporters held a vigil outside the doctor's house, but so far there have been no sightings of him in Portland.
Walker and Brett Heath, a detective sergeant with Queensland Police's fraud division are concluding a three-week trip to the United States, where they came to investigate Patel's work at a Portland hospital and in New York. They refused to disclose details of their work, saying only that it is "progressing."
"It's a long and complex investigation," said Walker. Oregon officials had suspended Patel's license in September 2000, banning him from doing certain types of operations - such as liver and pancreatic surgeries and forcing him to seek a second opinion in complicated cases. He was first cited by New York health officials in 1984 for failing to examine patients prior to surgery.
