Dr. Deborah Aaron is no longer an employee at Santa Fe's hospital, but she is licensed to practice surgery in New Mexico. No disciplinary actions against her are recorded with the State Medical Board.

The 56-year-old recently returned to Santa Fe from a trip to Libya with Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, according to a Facebook post she made in the fall.

Records from two other states where Aaron worked as a surgeon, however, indicate run-ins with medical oversight boards.

Aaron, charged with vehicular homicide Dec. 30 and suspected of driving while intoxicated, was briefly employed at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center for six months between September 2008 and March 2009. A hospital spokesman said Tuesday that he couldn't talk about the circumstances of her departure from the job.

Hospitals are required to notify the National Practitioner Data Bank of disciplinary action against a doctor, but those reports are not public.

Complaints about physicians that are filed with the New Mexico Medical Board are also not available to the public until investigators make a determination of merit, compliance manager J.J. Walker said Tuesday.

Aaron, 56, is a 1989 graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. She did her residency at Stanford University Medical Center until 1994, according to records. That year, she was board-certified by the state of Arizona. She was issued a certificate to also work in Alaska in 1999.

Records show she performed surgery at Ketchikan General Hospital, among other places in the far northwest, until at least 2004. She also worked as a surgeon in Idaho from February 1998 to November 1999.

In 2002, Alaska officials put her on probation and ordered Aaron to pay a fine when she admitted to writing prescriptions for controlled substances for a friend who was not her patient.

Later, she was issued a letter of reprimand by the Arizona Medical Board for a 1997 incident in which a patient died after abdominal surgery. The board documented that Aaron displayed unprofessional conduct by failing to "appreciate the risks of surgery pre-operatively," terminate a surgical procedure when complications arose and appropriately treat the patient after surgery.

The same document also says that a surgeon who assisted her in Alaska said Aaron performed hundreds of procedures and that her patients "enjoy post-operative results well within expectations."

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-303017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.




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