Misbehaving in the workplace

Unprofessional behavior was big in the Alaska news this week.

And one incident brought back memories of a case from the distant past.

The first one, which worried Christmas shoppers everywhere, was a video posted on Facebook showing workers at an Anchorage warehouse roughly throwing around packages shipped by Amazon.

The workers were at the Legacy Logistics warehouse near Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. The packages they were tossing back and forth bore the familiar swoosh logo of Amazon, the Seattle-based technical giant that has become one of the world’s leading retailers.

When the video received thousands of social media reposts, the stuff hit the fan. Some of the employees were fired, including (apparently) one person identified as a supervisor. Others were disciplined in various ways, all unannounced.

Then there was the dentist who was seen on video pulling a sedated patient’s tooth while standing on an active hoverboard. Dr. Seth Lockhart followed the tooth-yanking exercise by zooming down a hallway on his hoverboard, hands held triumphantly over his head.

Lockhart wound up with a copy of the video and texted it to friends and family. He described his performance as “a new standard of care.” (Let’s hope not.)

Lockhart was on trial this week on 42 charges including allegations that he unnecessarily sedated Medicaid patients in order to get the maximum payment possible. Investigators were told by an employee that Lockhart frequently gave patients unneeded sedation in order to increase his profit margins.

The charges he faced this week included one that he and his former office manager, Shauna Cranford, billed nearly $2 million in unjustified intravenous sedation in 2016. That represented nearly a third of all such payments in Alaska that year.

Cranford faced a judge in October and pled to various charges, including that she pulled teeth from a sedated patient even though she doesn’t have a dental license. She is scheduled for sentencing in February.

Those testifying at Lockhart’s trial this week included two of his patients. One said he woke up after being sedated and was surprised to find four of his teeth were missing and he had dentures that fit so poorly that it was difficult for him to talk, eat or breathe. The other patient said he was sedated by the dentist twice. The first time he woke up to find a crown had been placed on the wrong tooth. The second time he found a loose filling had not been repaired but another tooth had a filling installed in it.

Lockhart’s defense lawyer, Paul Stockler, apologized for what he called the dentist’s “idiotic” behavior.

The Lockhart case brought back memories of one that broke 52 years ago, the case of the Anchorage dentist who kept losing patients. Not patients who stopped going to him; they died in his dental chair.

On December 12, 1967, a young wife and mother of three went to see Dr. Robert W. Smith, Alaska’s only oral surgeon. Jennifer Peterson knew her teeth were in bad shape and Smith told her he might need four hours to get all the work done. It would involve many fillings and several extractions.

When her husband Tom came to pick her up, Dr. Smith invited him into his private office. There he told the horrified husband that his wife had suffered a cardiac arrest while in his dental chair. The news was hard to believe; Jennifer was in excellent physical shape except for her teeth.

Jennifer Peterson’s death was initially ruled to be heart failure during surgery, an unfortunate but natural cause, perhaps a reaction to the gas used to sedate her. Police got involved in the case when a maintenance man in the dentist’s building tipped them that Jennifer was not the first patient to die in Smith’s chair.

It turned out that Smith had often worked on two patients simultaneously, multiplying his billing capacity by running back and forth between patients who were sedated in adjacent operating rooms. He saved money on an anesthetist by doing the work himself.

The patients were sedated with gas administered through a mask. Smith would also administer oxygen by squeezing a bag, but that process also drove more gas into the patient’s system. Smith apparently didn’t realize it but by “bagging” the patients he was actually making their conditions worse.

Alaska State Trooper investigators learned that Jennifer Peterson was the fifth of the dentist’s patients to die in his office, including two children. All appeared to have succumbed to reactions from the sedative.

Smith was charged with two counts of negligent homicide and sentenced to six years in jail, all of it suspended. He eventually lost his license to practice dentistry.

Whether you are handling packages or patients, professionalism is all-important.