Life Healthcare to appeal court ruling on controversial oncologist Louis Kathan

22 Apr 2025

The healthcare group has vowed to pursue ‘all avenues of appeal’, saying that allowing Dr Louis Kathan to continue practising at Life Healthcare ‘fails to acknowledge the gravity of the harassment, racist and homophobic comments, and sexual aspects inherent in the misconduct’.

Life Healthcare has hit back following a Western Cape High Court ruling allowing an oncologist with an inappropriate bedside manner to continue to hold rooms at Vincent Pallotti private hospital.

Avanthi Parboosing, described as Life Healthcare’s “Chief People Officer”, has said the company “is extremely disappointed” by the ruling.

This month, in a landmark ruling, Judge Eduard Wille wrote that by terminating the relationship with doctor Louis Kathan, Life Healthcare “had constituted an interference with the rights to access healthcare services and was a breach of the negative obligations imposed on the hospital respondents”.

The court found that the decision to suspend Kathan from working at the hospital had also impeded the rights of the applicants – a group of cancer patients – to make decisions about their healthcare.

Kathan’s cancer patients who swore by his treatments and successes had brought the matter to court.

What he said

Parboosing said that in the company’s view, “allowing Dr Louis Kathan to continue practising in Life Healthcare, as a private medical practitioner, fails to acknowledge the gravity of the harassment, racist and homophobic comments, and sexual aspects inherent in the misconduct. He is still dismissed as an employee of the Company.”

Read more: Court rules celebrated but socially thoughtless oncologist may continue patient care at Vincent Pallotti

In a media release she said the company had dismissed Kathan as an executive and had removed his admission and practising privileges at the hospital in 2023.

Kathan’s dismissal for misconduct had followed “a comprehensive internal process and substantiated allegations of his harassment of the company’s staff, the use of racist and homophobic comments, and comments of a sexual nature in the workplace”.

Wille, in his ruling, noted that Kathan had explained that he was “not racist or homophobic as he is a homosexual man of colour”, while the hospital had contended that the doctor’s subjective intentions were irrelevant.

However, Wille ruled that Kathan had indeed not used “these offending words in a racist or homophobic manner”.

The termination decision by the group had been “arbitrary and disproportionate”. There was also no justification for declining to implement a rehabilitation plan, the judge said.

Patient rights

Parboosing said the termination occurred “to protect the rights of employees and clinical stakeholders, including their right to a safe working environment, and ensure the best possible treatment and healthcare for patients”.

She added that “our cancer patients receive comprehensive care from a multidisciplinary team of professionals and oncologists, including nurses, radiologists and other specialists, who collaborate closely to develop and implement treatment plans”.

If one oncologist “departs, the continuity of care remains intact. The remaining members are well equipped to seamlessly ensure the patients’ treatments proceed at the same high standard of clinical outcomes.”

Wille ruled that “where the exercise of power by a private body has public consequences, it may (depending on the circumstances, the context and the factual matrix) be regarded as an exercise of public power”.

While Life Healthcare Holdings had not denied that the public had an interest in the hospital acting in a lawful, ethical and rational manner, it also appreciated that the decision had affected the health of Kathan’s patients, said Wille.

Wille added that the public interest in the matter concerned fundamental constitutional rights.

“Self-evidently, the hospital respondents have a negative constitutional obligation not to undermine the right of access to healthcare. I say this also because of the peculiar facts of this matter,” he said.

Parboosing said that Life Healthcare “respectfully disagrees with the way in which the multidisciplinary nature of cancer patient care appears to have been disregarded and the manner in which what it regards as reprehensible workplace behaviour was dealt with”.

The hospital could not be expected to “elevate the demands of certain patients to receive the care of their choosing from a particular private medical practitioner above its rights and responsibilities to all stakeholders to maintain a safe and appropriate clinical environment”.

The company was “extremely concerned by the implications of this judgment and the far-reaching consequences it will impose – not only on the individuals directly involved but also on doctors and other hospital providers”.

The judgment, she added, was also at odds with another judgment by the same court which had determined that the termination by a private hospital of admission and practising privileges was not administrative action, and thus not subject to review by the high court.

Life Healthcare would seek to appeal the outcome and intended to prosecute “all avenues of appeal against the Court’s decision which we respectfully believe is incorrect”. DM

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What he said

Patient rights