Dr. Moshe Ashkenazi is a surgeon who was born in 1939. He had surgical privileges with the South Broward Hospital District. Pursuant to renewable contracts, he worked on-call shifts in several emergency rooms within the District for several years. In 2010, he was removed from the hospitals’ on-call schedules. In 2012, the District revoked his major surgical privileges. Dr. Ashkenazi sued the district for age discrimination and retaliation, asserting that the District’s actions “denied him opportunities for and access to employment by private patients.”
To make his case, Dr. Ashkenazi had to show that he was an employee of the hospital, not just an independent contractor. To show he was an employee of the District, Dr. Ashkenazi argued that the District counseled him to forgo limb salvage surgery in favor of amputation on elderly patients; instructed him to get second opinions on complex surgeries; subjected some of his past surgeries to a more strenuous review than the peer-review process; insisted that other doctors attend his surgeries as proctors; stopped scheduling him for on-call emergency surgeries because he could not guarantee that a proctor would be present; instructed him to use non-physician health practitioners during surgery; required him to keep logs and other reports of the services that he provided; instructed him to attend certain continuing education events; and ultimately revoked his major surgical privileges. Was Dr. Ashkenazi correct in stating that he was an employee? What additional information might be helpful for making this determination?
