How to Check a Surgeon's Disciplinary Record Before Surgery: What the Dr. Dare Ajibade Case Teaches

Most people who look up a doctor type the name into a state medical board website, see an active license and no red banner, and stop there. That check is worth doing, and we explain how below. But it answers a narrow question: does this person hold a valid license today, and has a board formally disciplined them. It does not tell you whether the surgeon is being sued, how many times, or whether a board has quietly concluded their care fell short without calling it discipline.

The Dr. Dare Ajibade cases are a useful example of the gap. Our article on the Dr. Dare Ajibade lawsuits lays out a public record that, as of this writing, includes multiple malpractice lawsuits and a Texas Medical Board action over a liposuction the board found did not conform to the standard of care. He denies the negligence allegations, and none of the pending claims have been proven. The point here is not the merits of those cases. It is that a patient running a five-minute license check in early 2024 would have seen very little of what later became public, because most of it lives in places a license lookup does not reach.

So this guide has two halves. First, the checks you can and should run yourself, all of them free. Second, the parts of a surgeon's history that the public record hides, so you know what your search is not showing you.

Start with a distinction that trips up a lot of patients. In most states, a medical license lets a physician practice medicine generally. It does not, by itself, restrict a doctor to the specialty they trained in or are board certified in. A licensed physician can legally perform procedures well outside their residency training, and the state board will not necessarily stop them unless a complaint proves the care was negligent.

That is the heart of our article on the Dr. Sasa Espino lawsuits. Dozens of former patients allege that a Richmond, Virginia breast surgeon performed complex reconstruction she was not qualified to do because she is a general surgeon and not a board-certified plastic surgeon. She denies all negligence, did not admit the state board's findings, and no claim has been proven. Whatever a court eventually decides, the case shows why a valid license alone tells you almost nothing about whether the person is the right surgeon for your operation.

The fix is to check board certification separately, and to check it in the specialty that matches your procedure. A cosmetic operation should generally be done by a surgeon board certified in plastic surgery, not by a physician who is board certified in something else and offers cosmetic work on the side.

The American Board of Medical Specialties runs a free public tool called Certification Matters at certificationmatters.org. There is no login. You search by the doctor's last name and it tells you whether they hold a current certification from one of the recognized ABMS member boards, and in which specialty. ABMS reports it lists more than a million board certified physicians across 38 specialties and dozens of subspecialties.

Read the result for the specialty, not just the yes or no. A physician can be genuinely board certified in one field and still be operating outside it. If your surgeon is doing a breast reconstruction, a tummy tuck, or liposuction, the certification you want to see is in plastic surgery. If the certification is in a different specialty, that is a question to ask before, not after.

Be careful with the phrase board certified in marketing materials too. There are self-designated boards that are not ABMS member boards and do not carry the same training requirements. The Certification Matters tool checks against the recognized boards, which is why it is a better starting point than a clinic's own website.

Every state has a medical board with an online license lookup, and it is the primary public record for discipline. The single fastest way to cover all of them at once is the Federation of State Medical Boards tool at docinfo.org, which is free and pulls together licensure and disciplinary information reported by the state and osteopathic boards that license every physician in the country. Enter the name and it will show whether the doctor has been disciplined, which states they hold active licenses in, where they trained, and their certification information, with links out to the individual boards for the details.

That last part matters because busy surgeons are often licensed in several states, and a problem in one state does not always follow the doctor everywhere at the same speed. As reported in our Ajibade article, that physician has held licenses in multiple states. Checking only the state where you live can miss an action taken somewhere else, so check every state where the surgeon is or was licensed.

Then go to the individual state board for the full record. In Texas, the Texas Medical Board publishes a physician profile for each licensee. By statute, that profile has to include the board's final resolution of certain malpractice claims and any malpractice case where the physician was found liable and a jury award became final. In Virginia, the Board of Medicine runs a separate practitioner profile system at vahealthprovider.com, and Virginia law requires physicians to report malpractice judgments and settlements over $10,000. Virginia does not publish the dollar figures; it sorts paid claims into below average, average, or above average for that specialty, and it warns that a payment is not proof that malpractice occurred. For our Washington, D.C. area readers, each of Virginia, Maryland, and the District runs its own board lookup, so check the ones that fit where the surgery happened.

Here is the part that surprises people. A board profile can look clean and still leave out most of what you would want to know, because of how the disclosure rules are written.

Pending malpractice lawsuits usually do not appear. In Texas, the law that governs physician profiles specifically bars the board from disclosing a pending malpractice claim or complaint to the public. The profile shows final outcomes, not active litigation. So a surgeon can be a defendant in several unresolved lawsuits, and the board profile will not list them. The malpractice suits against the physicians we cover surfaced through court records and news investigations, not through a board profile.

Non-disciplinary board orders can hide in plain sight. Boards can resolve a complaint with an order that is not classified as discipline. Texas has a formal version of this called a remedial plan. Under the Texas Occupations Code, a remedial plan is a non-disciplinary resolution, it is public information, and it cannot revoke, suspend, or restrict a license or impose a fine. By law it cannot be used to resolve a complaint involving a patient death, a felony, or sexual misconduct, and a physician can only receive one every five years. The practical lesson for a patient is this: a remedial plan means the board looked at a complaint and concluded something was worth acting on, even though it chose a resolution that is not labeled discipline. If you are scanning a profile only for the word disciplined, you can miss it. When the board takes any action over standard of care, read the actual order.

Settled cases may show little or nothing. A malpractice case that settles confidentially with no admission and no reported payment above the state threshold may leave almost no public trace on a board profile. That does not make the underlying care fine. It means the disclosure rules and the profile were never designed to give you the full picture.

There is one comprehensive national record of malpractice payments and adverse actions against physicians. It is called the National Practitioner Data Bank, and you cannot look up your surgeon in it. Hospitals, boards, and insurers report to it and query it, but it is closed to the public for individual practitioners.

For years the government published a de-identified Public Use File so researchers and journalists could study patterns without naming doctors. It removed that file in September 2011 after reporting showed the stripped-down data could be cross-referenced back to an individual physician, and access has stayed restricted since. So if you are looking for a single national button that says has this doctor ever been sued or paid a claim, it does not exist for consumers. You have to assemble the picture from the public pieces instead.

Because board profiles hide pending suits and the national data bank is closed, the real home of malpractice litigation is the local court system. Lawsuits are filed in the state trial court for the county where the doctor or clinic operates, and most of those records are public. The Ajibade suits sit in Harris County, Texas and in the Circuit Court for Fairfax County, Virginia. The Espino suits are in the Richmond, Virginia area courts.

You can search many of these dockets online through the county district clerk or circuit court clerk, usually by the doctor's name as a defendant. It takes patience, the search interfaces vary by county, and you have to know where the surgeon practices to know which courthouse to check. This is exactly the legwork that investigative reporters do. Our Sono Bello lawsuits article summarizes a KFF Health News and NBC News investigation that counted more than 60 malpractice suits against a single cosmetic surgery chain by combing court records across many states, the kind of pattern that never shows up on any one board profile.

One more distinction worth keeping straight, because it confuses people searching a surgeon's name online. A lawsuit over patient care is a medical malpractice case. It is a different thing from a shareholder or securities lawsuit against the company that owns a clinic, which is about stock disclosures, not surgical outcomes. If your search turns up a class action against a corporate parent, read closely before you assume it has anything to do with the quality of care.

Put together, a realistic background check on a surgeon looks like this. Confirm board certification in the specialty that matches your procedure, using certificationmatters.org. Run the name through docinfo.org to see every state license and any reported discipline. Open the profile on each relevant state board and read any order in full, not just the headline, watching for non-disciplinary resolutions like a Texas remedial plan. Search the trial court dockets in the county where the surgeon practices for lawsuits naming them.

Then ask the surgeon directly, and notice how they answer. Are you board certified in plastic surgery, or in another specialty? Do you have admitting privileges at a local hospital, and what happens if I have a complication that needs one? Who administers and tracks my anesthesia, and how much. For outpatient cosmetic surgery specifically, the recurring theme in the cases we cover is not the operation itself but what happened afterward, when a complication was handled by phone or brushed off. Our article on surgical errors explains the difference between a known risk of surgery and a preventable failure in how that risk was managed.

None of this guarantees a good outcome, and a surgeon with a spotless public record can still make a negligent mistake. But running these checks moves you from trusting a clinic's marketing to reading the actual public record, and it often surfaces the questions worth asking before you sign anything.

National Malpractice Lawyers represents patients and families harmed by negligent surgical care, including cases involving outpatient cosmetic surgery centers, anesthesia injuries, and post-operative complications that were dismissed or mishandled. If you believe you or a loved one was harmed during surgery, contact our office for a confidential case evaluation.

This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Where physicians are named, the lawsuits and allegations described are drawn from public court records, board records, and news reporting; the physicians deny wrongdoing where noted, and no court has issued a final ruling on the merits of those claims.