"VA officials overlooked or were unaware that a doctor was on the data bank’s list" and veterans suffered

Wichita VA fires doctor who medical board accuses of botching operations in Missouri

Kansas City Star
BY MIKE HENDRICKS
DECEMBER 30, 2019

The Government Accountability Office earlier this year faulted the VA for not always doing a good job checking the credentials of the doctors and other health professionals it hires. The report did not single out the Wichita hospital, but said that in some cases VA officials overlooked or were unaware that a doctor was on the data bank’s list.

Jim Guillaume of Independence blames the 2013 death of his wife, Susan, on a surgeon’s incompetence. Missouri officials agree that urologist Christel Wambi-Kiesse was out of his depth in the operating room. RICH SUGG RSUGG@KCSTAR.COM

The Department of Veteran Affairs hospital in Wichita has fired a doctor who Missouri regulators say botched operations while he was in private practice in the Kansas City area several years ago.

The VA began its investigation of Christel O. Wambi-Kiesse in September after The Kansas City Star reported that Missouri’s Board of Registration for the Healing Arts was seeking to discipline the 44-year-old urologist for allegedly harming patients while performing robot-assisted surgeries that were beyond his abilities.

The board cited three examples, all during 2013, while he was working for a now-defunct urology clinic associated with Centerpoint Medical Center in Independence. One woman died from a massive infection two months after Wambi-Kiesse punctured her bladder while performing a biopsy and failed to repair the damage, according to the complaint. The Star independently confirmed her identity as Susan Guillaume, who was 69 and lived in Independence.

“He poked two holes in her bladder, and then he said ‘we’re just going to let it heal naturally,’ “ her husband, Jim Guillaume, said in August. “Heal naturally? All that poison went into her abdominal cavity.”
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