Doctor Branded Negligent in License Hearing : Medicine: Two physicians testify against an Anaheim doctor who hastened a New Year’s birth. Two other newborns delivered by Charles Turner Jr. last year died.

SANTA ANA —  A UCLA Medical School obstetrics professor testified Thursday that an Anaheim physician who hastened a birth so that a newborn would be the first baby of 1990 was negligent in his handling of the delivery.

The Medical Board of California is seeking to revoke the license of Dr. Charles W. Turner Jr., who runs the Covenant Birthing Center on the grounds of Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim.

Though the New Year’s Eve baby was unharmed, two other newborn babies delivered by Turner last year at the birthing center died. A physician who treated one of those infants after the baby was rushed to Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange testified Thursday that the death “could have been prevented.”

The medical board alleges that Turner is incompetent, has endangered at least 20 patients since 1987 and “is a menace to the health and safety of the mothers and babies he treats.”

Turner, 65, has predicted that he will be vindicated in the licensing hearings before state Administrative Law Judge William F. Byrnes.

“God always wins,” he said Thursday.

The hearings began Monday and are expected to take at least three weeks, with both the board and Turner calling a battery of doctors as expert witnesses.

Testimony Thursday focused on the deliveries of the New Year’s Eve baby, 6-pound, 12-ounce Myrna Kristine Palmer, who was not harmed and whose mother has ardently defended Turner; and of an infant who was born prematurely Aug. 3, sent home by Turner as healthy the next day and pronounced dead on arrival at Children’s Hospital about 3 1/2 hours later.

Both the UCLA professor and the former Children’s Hospital doctor cited gross contradictions, inconsistencies and omissions in the babies’ and mothers’ charts. Each also testified that Turner had failed to perform ultrasounds or other procedures to determine the exact due dates of the babies, despite evidence that each fetus appeared to be much smaller than normal for its gestational age.

However, Turner’s attorney, Roy O. Moss Jr., said the experts are “academicians,” specialists accustomed to teaching hospitals who have no idea how babies are delivered in community hospitals.

“That’s the problem with being in an ivory tower,” he said.

Dr. Jean Ricci, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA School of Medicine, testified that the New Year’s Eve baby was not due until Feb. 4, according to Turner’s calculation.

Because the uterus was smaller than would be expected for such a due date, Ricci testified, “in my opinion . . . the patient should have had an ultrasound in order to either re-date the pregnancy or identify a (fetal) growth problem.” The chart showed no ultrasound was performed.

When the mother arrived in Turner’s office Dec. 29 dilated 3 centimeters, Ricci said, standard practice would “require aggressive management to attempt to halt the labor.”

Turner sent the mother home for bed rest and gave her an injection of a drug that Ricci testified would have “no effect” in stopping premature labor. When the mother returned New Year’s Eve to the birthing center, Turner delivered the baby, giving the mother a saddle block anesthetic at 11:44 p.m., using forceps at 11:59 p.m. and delivering the baby 15 seconds after midnight.

When the infant was, according to the chart, one minute old, Turner wrapped her in a blanket and a Christmas stocking and whisked her outside for 150 feet to Melodyland next door, to display the infant at a televised midnight religious service.

Ricci testified that the chart showed no medical reason either for administering the saddle block, which she described as a relatively high-risk anesthetic, or for using forceps.

She testified that the anesthetized mother should not have been left for nine minutes without a licensed anesthetist present and that the baby should not have been removed from the delivery room during its first 10 minutes of life because infants are usually given a standard examination called an Apgar test one, five and 10 minutes after birth.

Ricci also testified that she did not understand a notation added to the baby’s chart indicating that Turner had given the baby an Apgar test five minutes after birth because the baby would have had to be unwrapped from the blanket and Christmas stocking to perform such a test.

These actions all constituted an “extreme departure” from accepted standards of medical care, Ricci testified.

Dr. William Phakalides, a neonatologist formerly of Children’s Hospital, testified that he had reported Turner to the medical board after the death of the premature infant.

Phakalides said he had cared in 1989 for another baby whom he thought had received “less than optimum care” from Turner. That baby, who is not a subject of the current case, spent five days on a ventilator, he said.

“I’ll let anything go once because there are bad outcomes for no good reason, but when there was a pattern, I felt obligated to report it, as did the nurses,” Phakalides said.

Phakalides said he still does not know what caused the premature baby’s death. But he testified that the baby should not have been delivered in a birthing center because the 14-year-old mother was a high-risk patient.

He noted that the mother’s chart indicated four different due dates, ranging from July 20 to Sept. 20, and “gross discrepancies” between the due dates and the size of the uterus.

During delivery, according to the chart, the baby’s heart rate was measured just once an hour and did not vary, a condition Phakalides said would be “unusual . . . unless the fetus was in some sort of distress.”

After the birth, Turner noted that the baby boy was “whining” and that there were contradictory notations in the chart about whether he was eating, the doctor testified.

Turner sent the baby home as healthy. The infant was in full cardiac arrest by the time he arrived at Children’s about 3 1/2 hours later, according to the charts.

“It is probable that this infant had something that was treatable,” Phakalides said.

Asked whether Turner, a general practitioner, was being unfairly judged by the standards of teaching hospital specialists, Phakalides said: “I think every person is entitled to state-of-the-art care. . . . If that can be delivered by a family practitioner, that’s fine. If it cannot, then it must be delivered by a specialist in the field.”

Whoever the doctor, Phakalides said, the patient is entitled to “the best care possible.”