Overseers clear Maine surgeon of all counts of misconduct but 1

The Maine board that oversees doctors has cleared a surgeon from MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta of nearly every allegation of unprofessional behavior against him, closing an inquiry into the doctor’s conduct that has largely centered on his treatment of women.

The Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine, which is primarily made up of doctors, voted on Tuesday that Dr. Ian Reight had only violated one of the 16 counts against him. It found that he had acted unethically when he made an inappropriate sexual comment in front of a nurse who had also been his patient, prompting her to find a different physician.

The board imposed a year-long term of probation on his Maine license that will require him to pay up to $3,000 toward the cost of the disciplinary hearing. He will also be required to continue to meet with a professional mentor, something he said he has been doing since becoming aware of the extensive board complaint against him.

His coaching appeared to factor into the board’s reluctance to impose harsher disciplinary sanctions. One board member, Gregory Jamison, asked if the board had to call the discipline “probation” at all because it sounded too “pejorative.”

Reight, who has denied the allegations against him and continued to defend himself in testimony on Tuesday, will have the opportunity to appeal the decision when it becomes final during the board’s next meeting.

However, Reight plans to leave his position at MaineGeneral soon and does not plan to practice in Maine, he said. The press coverage of his conduct and the complaint against him “has done a pretty good job at making sure I can’t do that,” he said Tuesday.

Reight was the subject of an investigation by the Bangor Daily News in 2022 that found he rose to a leadership position at MaineGeneral despite at least five women submitting complaints about him to hospital officials. He stepped down as president of medical staff and the hospital’s board of directors in November 2022, shortly after publication.

Several of Reight’s former colleagues complained to the licensing board, which began holding an adjudicatory hearing this summer, into whether to discipline the doctor, an action that could have involved anything from a reprimand to revoking his license to practice in Maine. The hearing was held over individual days each month.

The original complaint included 15 counts related to sexual harassment, bullying and demeaning behavior, and concerns about patient safety. In August, the board dropped the patient safety counts.

Then, last month, the board added an additional count against Reight when a former social worker at the hospital brought forward allegations after reading about the hearing in a news story. That count ended up being the only allegation of unethical misconduct that the board found violated professional licensing rules.

During a hearing in November, the social worker testified that she saw Reight crawl on the floor toward a nurse until he was near her crotch in 2016; then he described how long he could hold his breath. The social worker reported what she saw to hospital officials.

The nurse, who also testified last month, said she had been embarrassed and did not report the incident because she was already dealing with the stress of a breast cancer diagnosis. In addition to working together, Reight had also been her surgeon. The nurse described how he called her later to ask if she had reported him. She then switched to a different surgeon for her medical care.

Members of the board noted on Tuesday that, unlike some of the other allegations against Reight, he did not deny that he made the comment, and it had a clear negative impact on the nurse. The board found he violated “a standard of professional behavior” that was likely to “interfere with the delivery of care.”

“I think this was a serious violation professionally,” said board member Dr. Renee Fay-LeBlanc. “I don’t think Dr. Reight intended that. I think he’s been honest and has problems with boundaries and thinks he’s being funny, but I think this is pretty significant.”

Reight addressed the allegation for the first time during his testimony on Tuesday. While he denied ever crawling on the floor, he characterized the comment as a joke made in poor taste with a person he considered a friend who enjoyed “salty” banter. He did not mean to upset her and expressed dismay at the offense he caused, he said.

Reight, 52, spent much of his testimony on Tuesday expressing regret for how he hadn’t learned to separate personal and professional boundaries. He struggled to do so at MaineGeneral when the social dynamics within his tight-knit surgery group began to break down and grew “toxic” in March 2020, he said.

But he denied specific allegations related to demeaning or inappropriate comments he made to colleagues or about patients, claiming he was not a person who would speak that way. For instance, he said he did not compare someone’s appearance to that of a chemo patient, noting his own mother’s battle with cancer. He also did not speak to a female colleague in a disparaging way when he expressed concerns about her qualifications to perform a job during a surgery.

He described his unlikely path to medicine that began with a difficult childhood in the Washington D.C. area, dropping out of high school and becoming a firefighter and emergency medical technician. He never truly shed the “firehouse” camaraderie that blurred the lines between personal and professional relationships — something he realized was a “theme” among complaints, he said.

Reight has since attended professional development courses, he said. He has also met regularly with a therapist and with two doctors who served as professional mentors, one of whom recently defended him before the board. One of the most helpful lessons he took from those meetings is a greater understanding of women’s perceptions, he said.

“It helped me have empathy,” Reight told the board.

Board members credited that work when discussing the terms of his probation on Tuesday. They also asked him why he took those steps if he denied any wrongdoing.

The surgeon said he took advantage of the opportunities for self-improvement.

“In surgery, you’re always trying to make someone better, and I wanted to be better,” he said.

Fighting back tears, he said the allegations against him in the 2021 board complaint  “were horrifying to me” and made him question who he was as a person and a surgeon.

He called the public airing of those complaints, both in the BDN and in the public disciplinary hearings, “devastating.”