Knock Knock Eye: Nine Neonatologists Fired Without Explanation

I just wrapped my second call week of the year, and honestly, getting older has made overnight pages so much harder than they used to be. At 30 I could wake up from a dead sleep and immediately have a coherent medical conversation, and now, ten years later, I basically have to be walked through who I am and what hospital I'm even at before I can function. I also tell the story of getting completely lost in a big Portland hospital after hours, which honestly just confirms the stereotype that ophthalmologists get lost in hospitals. 

Then I get into something a lot more serious: my latest deep dive into hospital administrations behaving badly, this time at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford, Oregon. Nine neonatologists, an incredibly stable, highly skilled group who'd been building this NICU program for two decades, were told in January they were being let go, with shifting and frankly contradictory explanations from the hospital. I walk through the timeline, including the hospital's decision to bring in a private equity-backed locums staffing company, a VP's misleading public comments about the firing, and the deleted panel video that followed once I called it out. I explain why I keep making these videos, even when people ask what the point is, because these decisions affect real patients, and communities deserve to know why their care is changing.

Takeaways:

Turns out being a doctor and getting woken up at 3 AM hits different in your 40s than it did in your 30s.

Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center fired all nine of its neonatologists in January despite the group having no departures since 2021 and meeting national quality benchmarks.

The hospital's stated reasons for the firings shifted over time and were contradicted by a hospital VP's own public comments about ongoing retirements.

Locum staffing companies are typically meant to bridge short-term staffing gaps, not replace an entire well-functioning department, and often cost hospitals significantly more per hour than the doctors they're replacing.

Physicians who raise patient safety concerns internally can face professional and legal pressure that discourages them from speaking publicly, even after losing their jobs.

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