STORY: "Former head of Motherisk program under investigation by medical regulator," by reporter Rachel Mendleson, published by The Toronto Star on March 1, 2017.
SUB-HEADING: "Dr. Gideon Koren retired from SickKids in June 2015 after the hospital shuttered the Motherisk lab and reassigned oversight of the Motherisk program."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Dr. Gideon Koren, former director of the Motherisk program at the Hospital for Sick Children, is being investigated by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. "
GIST: Dr. Gideon Koren, the founder and former director of the Hospital for Sick Children’s embattled Motherisk program, is under investigation by the province’s medical regulator. The
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) has confirmed it
is investigating Koren — a rare move by the college, which is mandated
to keep confidential its investigations unless there is a “compelling
public interest” to disclose the information. College spokesperson Kathryn Clarke said she could not provide details about the nature of the probe or when it was launched. A SickKids spokesperson said the hospital sent the CPSO a summary of findings from its internal investigation
into Motherisk in 2015. The SickKids probe was launched after a Star
investigation exposed questions about the reliability of Motherisk’s
hair drug and alcohol tests. The probe uncovered serious problems at the
lab and its affiliated call centre, prompting a public apology by
hospital CEO Michael Apkon, who had initially defended the reliability
of Motherisk’s tests. Koren retired from SickKids in June 2015 after the hospital shuttered the Motherisk lab and reassigned oversight
of the Motherisk program. He could not be reached for comment and his
lawyer did not respond to calls from the Star for this story. He
is listed as a member of the big data team at Maccabitech, the business
development arm of the Maccabi Group, an Israeli health-care company.
His profile on the Maccabitech website describes him as a “clinical
pharmacologist/ toxicologist with long experience on the effects and
adverse effects of medications and chemicals in human. (sic)” “At
the University of Toronto he established and oversaw a large research
program on the safety and risks of drugs in pregnancy and children,” the
profile states. There is no mention of SickKids or Motherisk, which he founded
at the hospital in 1985 and grew into a leading resource for pregnant
and lactating women and their doctors about the effects of medications,
alcohol and drugs of abuse. Maccabitech did not immediately respond to a
request for comment. Koren
has held a medical licence in Ontario since 1982 and is also licensed
to practise in Israel, where he was educated, according to his CPSO profile. A source confirmed that he is living and working in the Tel Aviv area. Spokespersons
for the departments of medicine and pharmacy at University of Toronto,
where Koren has previously taught, said on Tuesday that he no longer
holds appointments with those faculties......... The
CPSO reprimanded and fined Koren $2,500 in 2003 for writing anonymous
“poison pen letters” to Dr. Nancy Olivieri and other colleagues at
SickKids during a tense battle with Olivieri — behaviour the
disciplinary panel described as “childish, vindictive and dishonest.”
Koren denied writing the letters until they were tied to him through DNA
testing. In December 2015, a provincially established independent review
concluded that Motherisk’s hair tests were “unreliable” and
“inadequate” for use in the thousands of child protection proceedings
across Canada and handful of criminal cases in which they were submitted
as evidence between 2005 and 2015. Child
welfare agencies relied heavily on Motherisk’s hair tests as proof of
parental substance abuse. Although child protection cases were the
“bread and butter” of the lab’s work, no one in the lab, including
Koren, had forensic training, and operations “fell woefully short of
internationally recognized forensic standards,” wrote Justice Susan
Lang, who conducted the review.
Lang
identified significant concerns with the reliability of the hair tests
for the entire 2005-2015 period she was assigned to review. But the
tests Motherisk conducted before 2010 were particularly problematic.
During this period, the lab did not have the capability to confirm
results with so-called gold-standard testing, and relied on a
preliminary screening test, despite the fact that “the requirement to
carry out a confirmation test on any preliminary positive results . . .
was highlighted in both the literature and in all internationally
recognized hair-testing standards well before 2005,” Lang concluded. There
was also a written caution included in the screening test that
Motherisk used stating that it “provides only a preliminary analytical
test result. A more specific alternate chemical method must be used in
order to obtain a confirmed analytical result.” Yet
Motherisk “very rarely” sent samples to its reference laboratory for
such confirmation and failed to inform children’s aid societies and
other customers that the results were only preliminary, Lang found. From
2005 to 2010, Koren signed each of the result reports before they were
released, but neither he nor anyone else at Motherisk checked the work
of the technician who performed virtually all of the tests, Lang
concluded. (Although her review was limited to the 2005-2015 period,
Lang reported that Motherisk started performing hair tests for use in
child protection proceedings in the 1990s.) Koren has never spoken publicly about the Motherisk controversy. The
SickKids’ investigation revealed that Motherisk had misled the hospital
for several years about its proficiency testing process. It also
exposed a privacy breach at the Motherisk call centre resulted in staff
using records in at least 70 cases to contact people for their consent
to use their data without the approval of the hospital’s Research Ethics
Board. Following questions from the Star
in 2015 about Koren’s ties to the Quebec-based drug company Duchesnay,
the maker of Diclectin, a popular morning sickness drug that Motherisk
endorsed, the hospital implemented new conflict-of-interest policies and
added a disclosure on the Motherisk website. An ongoing probe
of thousands of individual child protection cases in Ontario that
relied on Motherisk testing has so far identified 24 cases in which the
hair tests played a key role in the decision to remove children from
their families. Koren and SickKids are
named as co-defendants in several lawsuits seeking damages on behalf of
parents who claim they lost custody of their children due to Motherisk’s
flawed hair tests. In his online profile
at Maccabitech in Israel, Koren is described as “the author of more than
1,600 scientific papers.” The Lang review identified six articles he
co-authored that incorrectly stated that results obtained using the
screening test had been confirmed with a gold-standard method “when that
was not so.”"
The entire story can be found at:
See related Toronto Star editorial at the link below: " Investigation into founder of Motherisk program is long overdue: Editorial: Finally, the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons is investigating Dr. Gideon Koren."..."For
two and a half years a Star investigation has revealed scandalous
shortcomings that shattered families and ruined reputations in the
now-defunct Motherisk hair-testing program at Toronto’s Hospital for
Sick Children. The stories led to provincial and internal reviews of the program that tested hair strands for traces of drug or alcohol abuse. Now the Star’s Rachel Mendleson has confirmed the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons is investigating the founder and former director of the discredited program, Dr. Gideon Koren. The
college won’t provide details of the probe or when it was launched, but
it is long overdue. Too many questions have been left outstanding about
how the Motherisk program could have been run for a full 10 years with
so many alarming shortcomings that affected so many child protection and
criminal cases. In fact, Koren and
SickKids are named as co-defendants in several lawsuits seeking damages
on behalf of parents who claim they lost custody of their children due
to Motherisk’s flawed hair tests. The
lawsuits come as no surprise. The provincial review concluded that
Motherisk’s hair tests were “unreliable” and “inadequate for use in the
thousands of child protection proceedings across Canada and handful of
criminal cases in which they were submitted as evidence between 2005 and
2015.” And SickKids’ own investigation revealed that Motherisk had misled the hospital for years about how it carried out its tests. Meanwhile,
an ongoing probe of thousands of child protection cases in Ontario that
relied on Motherisk testing for traces of drug or alcohol abuse has so
far identified 24 cases in which the hair tests played a key role in the
decision to remove children from their families. Among
the questions raised in the provincial review by Justice Susan Lang
that the college would do well to consider when investigating Koren:
- Why no one in the lab he created and oversaw had forensic training, even though child protection cases were the “bread and butter” of the lab’s work.
- Why the lab did not have the capability to confirm results from 2005 to 2010 with the so-called gold-standard of testing.
- Why the lab failed to inform children’s aid societies and other customers that the results were only preliminary.
It’s time there were answers from Motherisk’s founder and director. The college’s job now is to get them, and make them public.
For a glimpse into the legal morass some innocent parents were put through inside Ontario's child welfare system when trying to get children lost because of Motherisk's shameful practices, see the link below: Superior Court Justice Grant Campbell determined that the parents received incompetent counsel from lawyers Brigitte Gratl and Jane McKenzie. Gratl represented the mother in the case and the father retained McKenzie. Both were retained through Legal Aid. The case, which was heard in Kitchener, Ont., concerned a since-debunked Motherisk drug test that the mother took, which resulted in her child — identified as K. — being removed from her custody in 2012. The case languished through the system for years, and it became what Campbell described as a perfect storm of “errors, incompetence, institutional oversights and mistakes,” which left the child in a “legal limbo,” where neither parent had contact with her. In his 101-paragraph decision, Campbell said the parents and K. “have been consumed and trampled by the Frankenstein process we have created and allowed to become unmanageable.” He painted a dark picture of the country’s child welfare system, where judges and courts are scrambling to keep up and the few private counsel that will take these kinds of legal aid cases are completely overwhelmed. He said the system’s process is underfunded and overworked and has been exacerbated by last year’s R. v. Jordan decision in the Supreme Court of Canada. “The child welfare system in Ontario is broken,” Campbell wrote. “The patchwork of child welfare legislation spread across Canada is not working.” Campbell apologized to the parents “on behalf of the very system that perpetrated this upon you.” Lawyers say Campbell’s decision is unusual, as rather than simply making a ruling on narrow legal issues, the judge took the opportunity to comment on the system at large. “He revealed the underbelly and the weaknesses of the family court system,” says Steven Benmor, a Toronto family lawyer, who was not involved in the case. Benmor says Campbell’s criticisms of the child welfare system are accurate when it comes to Ontario, as the system is broken when it fails even one family. “When these people fall through the cracks, it reveals a weakness in the overall system,” he says. Campbell found that both Gratl and McKenzie had “dropped the ball” in their handling of the case and that they both failed to register their clients’ objections to delays and procedural unfairness. “The transcripts appear to show that both parent’s counsel had no plan/nor any or much preparation to do anything positive for their clients, other than cross examine (at length) whatever evidence the Agency brought forward,” Campbell wrote. “The overall picture appears that both counsel effectively conceded the result of the procedural delays and the status quo that had been established.” The parents filed a long list of complaints against the two lawyers, which included that they had ignored instructions, been unprepared, shown an unwillingness to consult or explain and had even showed disdain for their clients. Campbell found that McKenzie had failed to zealously represent her client’s interests throughout the trial and ignored the father’s indigenous heritage. Campbell also found that Gratl took no steps to get a competing drug test to challenge the Motherisk one. Nor did she bring a motion before the court concerning the mother’s indigenous heritage, which would have affected the child’s placement. Campbell found that three and a half years had elapsed from the time K. was taken from her mother and when the trial judge issued her decision, which he said was “not only entirely unacceptable, it is reprehensible.” The judge also found that the trial process was “unfair, unjust and skewed against the parents.” “The integrity of the administration of justice was compromised by this trial and brought into disrepute,” Campbell said. While Campbell found that the trial judge’s decision was unreliable, he declined to set aside the decision and issue a new trial, as he determined that would further harm the stability of the child, who was set to be adopted by a foster parent. He did, however, order that the parents be given contact to the child.
http://www.lawtimesnews.com/201702275969/headline-news/motherisk-case-shows-cracks-in-child-welfare
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
