The original poster stated, in her second post,

>The Washington State Veterinary Board does not suspend a vets license
>on one accusation.

ALL medical boards (physician, veterinarian, nursing, pharmacy,
psychology, etc) do *indeed* have the option of suspending a license to
practice on only one accusation, if they determine that accusation is
severe enough to warrant a suspension until further investigation is
completed. While my husband's license was not suspended, he faced this
possibility on ONLY one accusation -- which was invented by the area
supervisor for his grocery store chain, who's only interest was in
cutting costs for the company. He *never* received one single complaint
from any of his patients -- in fact, many of them wrote letters of
outrage to the store, as well as letters of support to the state
pharmacy board, after all this happened. The state board had the choice
of either suspending or not suspending his license, & they chose not
to do so, as they did not consider this a legitimate matter.

I do not know this veterinarian, I do not know the details of the case,
I do not know how many complaints were filed, & I certainly would not
venture to guess the facts. However, the statement made about license
suspensions is not true, & I simply wanted to explain how this works.
If a physician who works w/ humans were to make a serious mistake,
resulting in the permanent disability or death of a patient, the
medical board would NOT wait until that doctor made the same mistake 5
more times before taking action -- they would do it immediately. The
same approach is taken by *all* medical boards. To do otherwise would
be unethical on the part of the medical professions.

Lin

[Posted in FML 7155]