An osteopathic medical school in Parker has ousted its dean and made over its board after a dust-up caused either by legal troubles in the dean’s past or a conflict in management style, depending on who is telling the story.
Rocky Vista University, where about 150 medical students are finishing their first year, fired Dr. Ronnie B. Martin because of “ethical issues” that came to light a few months ago, interim president Robert Black said Tuesday. The school learned late last year that Martin’s medical license had been suspended in Iowa, Black said.
“We are concerned about what people think of us,” he said. “Our ethics are important to us.”
The Iowa Board of Medicine suspended Martin’s medical license in September after he had refused to submit to a clinical competency evaluation to judge his medical skills years earlier.
The board also issued a public reprimand and ordered Martin to pay a $5,000 fine.
But Martin said he was upfront about the trouble in Iowa — which he is still fighting in court — when he was hired in 2006 and that the school’s leaders were using it as a “smokescreen.”
Martin called it “very distressing” that the university’s president and owner were trying to make him look like a “bad person,” when in fact they had disagreed about the direction of the school.
“I’m not going to go to that level,” he said.
Black, though, said the Iowa ethical issues “didn’t reflect properly on this school, on this faculty, on these kids.”
Four of the private medical school’s nine board members also were asked to leave after months spent deciding how to handle the dean’s job status.
Former board chairman Ian Levenson, a family practice doctor in Greenwood Village, said he couldn’t talk about why he left the board until the matter is resolved.
The school is the only other medical school in the state besides the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. Unlike CU, which hands out M.D.s, Rocky Vista will award D.O.s, doctors of osteopathy.
Osteopaths, who practice holistic medicine, are licensed by the state board of medical examiners and have the same privileges to practice at hospitals and prescribe medication.Black said the university likely will appoint new board members and begin looking for a new dean during the summer break.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting errof, it included an incorrect abbreviation for an osteopathic doctor. The correct abbreviation is D.O.
