Dr. Ahmed Abdel-Aziz has to fight back the tears when he thinks about leaving his patients.
He wants them to know that his departure from the Greenwood pain clinic he has headed for the past 18 years was not what he wanted but something he felt compelled to do for his own financial security.
“I’m not a quitter. I didn’t leave because I’m looking for a better job or better money,” the 57-year-old physician said Thursday.
Greenwood Leflore Hospital is closing its Pain Management Center on July 8 and laying off the other six employees who work there because, the hospital said, it could not find a physician to replace Aziz.
Aziz and Jason Studley, the hospital’s CEO, give differing versions as to what led Aziz to seek employment elsewhere.
Aziz said he had been working for the same salary for more than nine years and had asked for an increase of less than 5% when his three-year contract came up for renewal. The current contract expires at the end of June. Not only was the raise denied, according to Aziz, but he was told by Studley that a three-year contract extension was on hold because it was “not the right time” to take it to the hospital board for approval, given the hospital’s deteriorating financial condition.
He said Studley instead proposed that Aziz continue working without a contract on a month-to-month basis. Aziz said he considered that unacceptable, as it would have provided him with no job security. “So I felt it’s time for me to move on. I owe it to my family and to myself to have a secure job, not to work month by month,” he said.
He will be joining the medical staff at the pain clinic of an Evansville, Indiana, hospital operated by Deaconess Health System.
Studley, however, said Aziz’s retelling of the contract negotiation is inaccurate.
“That’s not how it went down,” the CEO said.
He said Aziz approached him for a raise in October. “I explained to him we couldn’t do that,” Studley said.
Aziz, according to Studley, said that he would have to resign but would try to help the hospital find a physician to take his place. Studley said it was Aziz who raised the possibility of continuing to work on a month-to-month basis while the physician pursued other options. “He gave his 90-day notice officially in April,” Studley said.
Despite the pending separation, both the physician and the CEO are reluctant to criticize the other.
“I don’t hold it against him,” Aziz said of his departure.
“He has served this community well for 18 years,” Studley said of Aziz.
A native of Egypt, Aziz graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Medicine with a specialty in pain management. He moved to Greenwood in 2004 after the previous pain clinic provider died in an automobile accident.
He and a nurse practitioner at the Pain Management Center, according to Aziz, have handled on average 50 patients a day combined. Many of those patients are referred by primary care physicians, who have become reluctant to prescribe painkillers due to the additional scrutiny caused by the nation’s opioid epidemic.
Those who come to the clinic suffer from chronic, sometimes debilitating, pain, with neck and low back pain the most common ailment. The clinic treats them both with non-opioids, such as anti-inflammatory drugs and muscle relaxants, as well as opioids. Before prescribing opioids, all incoming patients are screened to be certain they don’t have a history of addiction, Aziz said.
He said the clinic has had no shortage of patients, with waiting lists of two to three months to get an appointment. “There is a huge demand for our services.”
Starting in July, those services will have to be found elsewhere. The Pain Management Center has provided its patients with a list of 13 pain clinics within two hours’ drive. The closest is located in Greenville.
“I feel bad about the situation, but I’m a human being,” Aziz said. “I have to look out for my own interests and my family’s interests.”
For the past five years, Aziz has been maintaining two residences, one in Greenwood and the other in Madison. His and his wife’s youngest child has severe autism. The family bought the home in Madison so that the boy, now 10, could receive the specialized educational and therapeutic services that Aziz said were not available in Greenwood.
Aziz would spend five days a week alone in Greenwood and then join his family for weekends. He said he was willing to continue with that expensive and inconvenient arrangement indefinitely because he liked his work and was committed to the community. He said he understands the financial pressures the hospital has been under but is certain his practice did not contribute to the perilous decline in cash reserves.
“Because I care a lot about the hospital that I have been working at for the last 18 years, I always try to be extremely careful not to say anything negative about the hospital,” he said. “However, it’s not fair to simply attribute the closure of the clinic to my decision to leave the practice after 18 years.”
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
