Each state has its own set of statutes and regulations on licensing doctors, accommodating patients who wish to file complaints, and releasing information about physicians who have been subject to discipline and legal action. On this page, we’re sharing the key findings regarding Virginia, which we will continue to update as the series progresses.
Key fact: After a license expires, any disciplinary action remains on the Virginia board’s website for five years. Any license revoked or suspended and not reinstated remains posted for 50 years.
“Since (the doctor) has shown appropriate insight and remorse for his conduct, no sanction is necessary to protect the public.”
— The Virginia Board of Medicine, on the case of a doctor who engaged in a sexual relationship with a patient for more than two years.
Despite a charge Woodard had raped a patient, the board allowed him to return to practice.
The criminal case started in 2002, when the doctor offered to tutor a pregnant patient he had flirted with in his office. When she phoned him to accept the tutoring offer, he picked her up at her home and then had sex with her in his car, the board alleged. Two days later, he sent her a letter apologizing for his “assertive behavior” and enclosing $150 he said could be used to pay for tutoring, and he wrote off the remaining balance from her office visit. But the incident led to his arrest for sodomy and sexual penetration by force, threat or intimidation.
In 2003, Woodard took a plea deal that reduced the sexual penetration charge to sexual battery, suspended a six-month jail sentence and waived a charge of sodomy if he successfully completed his probation. He also had to surrender his license for those six months.
The board cited that conviction and his later disclosure that he had prior sexual contacts with two other patients in ordering in 2003 that his license be suspended for at least 15 months.
In 2005, after he completed ethics courses and underwent therapy, a board committee concluded he was sincerely remorseful and reinstated him on probation. By 2008, the board removed all restrictions on his license.
A few weeks later, he prescribed an inappropriately high dose of a narcotic to a patient already on pain medication without performing a complete physical exam, the board said. The patient died the following day from multiple prescription toxicity. The board said he also had prescribed addictive medicines to five other patients without adequate exams or monitoring. So in 2011, the board once again suspended his license. In 2014, it denied his petition for reinstatement.
“I think that [the cases] are related to my mental illness,” he told the Jounral-Constitution. He said he has continued therapy and, though he no longer practices, “thanks to the treatments I’m much more careful” in day-to-day interactions.
Click here to find your state!