In a release Jan. 7, The Jefferson Council — a group of conservative University alumni — shared a 239-page document which included a report on U.Va. Health, detailing misconduct under the leadership of Craig Kent, former chief executive officer of U.Va. Health, and Melina Kibbe, former dean of the School of Medicine. A spokesperson for Kent and Kibbe provided The Cavalier Daily with a Motion to Dismiss document filed in court Jan. 9 which denied similar allegations against Kent, Kibbe, Wendy Horton, former CEO of the Medical Center, and Allan Tsung, chair of the department of surgery, in a lawsuit filed in October.
The report, which was provided to the Board of Visitors in February 2025 by law firm Jones Swanson Huddell, LLC, explained specific concerns, including that Kent and Kibbe hired unqualified surgeons as well as turned away COVID-19 patients so hospital beds could remain open for patients receiving high-revenue, elective surgeries.
Although the University hired law firm Williams & Connolly LLP to produce a report on alleged misconduct at U.Va. Health, Jones Swanson Huddell represented 36 physicians who participated in the Williams & Connolly investigation and provided its own, additional report to the Board.
The allegations from the 36 physicians who spoke to Jones Swanson Huddell for the report echo a number of those in a lawsuit filed against Kent and other medical system executives in October. On behalf of Kent and Kibbe, Kibbe’s chief of staff told The Cavalier Daily the allegations were “baseless” and “unfounded” at the time of the lawsuit. In response to a request for comment regarding the Jones Swanson Huddell report, Sean O’Connell, shareholder with Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC, wrote on behalf of Kent and Kibbe that the report contains the same “false allegations” as the lawsuit.
“ … This [report] contains no new information and was originally prepared by the plaintiff’s attorneys to present the false allegations of a small group of faculty in the U.Va. School of Medicine, that are now the subject of litigation,” O’Connell wrote.
The Jefferson Council received the report via a Freedom of Information Act request, and University Spokesperson Bethanie Glover verified the document’s authenticity. However, she noted that the report was prepared by Jones Swanson Huddell on behalf of its clients and was not created by or on behalf of the University. Glover said that Williams & Connolly delivered an oral briefing on its findings to the Board in February, and that no written report was produced by the firm hired by the University to investigate the allegations.
The review by both firms followed a letter of no confidence sent Sept. 5, 2024 to the Board of Visitors, in which 128 U.Va. Physicians Group-employed faculty demanded the removal of Kent and Kibbe. The physicians expressed that Kent and Kibbe were initiating “egregious acts” within U.Va. Health and the School of Medicine. Williams & Connolly was hired by the University shortly after the letter of no confidence to investigate the claims made by those physicians.
The allegations
The report from Jones Swanson Huddell, sent to the Board Feb. 24, 2025 ahead of a Feb. 25, 2025 meeting during which Kent offered his resignation, alleged that Kent and Kibbe mismanaged funding and retaliated against physicians who questioned their leadership.
Six allegations towards Kent and Kibbe’s leadership and their “detrimental” impacts on U.Va. Health were the focus of the Jones Swanson Huddell report. However, the motion to dismiss counts against Kent, Kibbe, Horton and Tsung claimed that the ongoing suit does not present sufficient factual evidence for allegations against them.
“This case is, at best, an aspirational medical malpractice and employment lawsuit dressed up as a RICO action in a vain attempt to get into federal court,” the motion to dismiss stated.
One allegation brought against Kent and Kibbe in the report claimed that they had insisted on hiring two unqualified cardiothoracic surgeons, even though there had been internal warnings from the search committees against appointing those individuals — Ourania Preventza and Kim de la Cruz. Preventza and de la Cruz did not respond to requests for comment.
The report explained that U.Va. Health had a search committee in place tasked with hiring a new chief of cardiothoracic surgery in January 2023, though the members of that search committee are not stated or publicly available. Preventza was one of the candidates considered but was put on the “do not hire” list by the committee, according to the report. Despite that, Kent and his leadership team hired her — although Kent’s motive to appoint Preventza remains unclear from the report — and Preventza’s role began June 19, 2023.
Among the multiple individuals who spoke out against Preventza’s appointment was Angela Taylor, lead quality officer for heart and vascular services. The report claimed that Taylor received multiple calls from Baylor University — the institution where Preventza previously worked — that said she could not be trusted to perform surgery alone.
Preventza began performing cardiothoracic surgery at U.Va. Health in October 2023, and the report claimed that within three weeks, residents working with her expressed concern that she was having them conduct techniques they had not yet been taught. Additionally, it reported that many of Preventza’s patients were spending double the time necessary in surgery — putting them in danger by increasing their chances of suffering from a stroke.
According to the U.Va. Health provider website, neither Preventza or de la Cruz are listed as current staff. Preventza left the U.Va. Health System ahead of Kent and Kibbe, and according to his LinkedIn profile, de la Cruz — who served as an associate professor of cardiothoracic surgery — left the health system in September 2025.
The motion filed in support of Kent and Kibbe says that poor clinical skill does not establish a crime, but does not comment on Preventza’s or de la Cruz’s qualifications.
Another allegation said that Kent “repeatedly” pressured Pediatric Oncologist Daniel “Trey” Lee to perform unsafe procedures on his patients. According to the report, Kent refused to provide Lee with the staff necessary to perform a bone marrow transplant. The transplant is a “dangerous” procedure for certain cases of pediatric cancer, and one that Lee described in an interview with lawyers as requiring a highly specialized team.
The report stated that Lee was left as the sole pediatric oncologist after three others resigned from U.Va. Health, but despite that, Kent pressured him to perform the transplant alone. This was something Lee characterized in an interview with Williams & Connolly as “out of bounds” and “medical malpractice” without others on the team.
Further, Lee reported in his interview with Williams & Connolly that he felt that if he were to step down, a less experienced physician could hurt the pediatric patients.
“‘... Part of medicine,’ Dr. Lee said, ‘is knowing your limitations and knowing when to ask for help,’” the report wrote. “[Lee] described how he worried that ‘harm will come to these kids’ if he — the only barrier to Dr. Kent's insistence of conducting an unsafe marrow transplant on a child — were taken down.”
The 36 physicians emphasized the wrongdoings of Kent during the COVID-19 pandemic specifically, stating Kent laid off and disrespected many of his physicians and staff, filling their positions with less experienced individuals. The report further claimed that at the start of the pandemic, Kent elected to take a vacation and upon his return, he changed all protocols other physicians had put in place to treat the virus. They said he instead prioritized holding rooms for elective surgeries to increase the hospital’s revenue, despite those rooms and beds being needed for COVID-19 patients.
“Dr. Kent ordered his staff to turn away COVID-19 patients on the pretext that they did not have the resources to treat them — meanwhile, he also ordered his staff to keep rooms and beds empty in anticipation of the eventual return of high-dollar elective surgeries,” the report wrote.
Further, the report said that the Commonwealth had only 80 COVID-19 tests available for the eight million people in the state in March 2020. Kent went on to use several of those tests for himself and his family members, according to allegations in the report.
The report later alleges that Kent, Kibbe and Horton created an “atmosphere of chaos” which harmed patients. The report specifically cites the mismanagement of money under Kent, Kibbe and Horton’s leadership, explaining U.Va. Health was not paying its bills during this time but was spending money in other ways such as purchasing three hospitals in Northern Virginia.
The motion, also filed on behalf of Horton, called these allegations “a random mix” and false, and wrote that the allegations highlight that Kent was making “necessary” decisions as CEO during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the motion focused on the lawsuit, which alleges a racketeering scheme created by Kent, it does not go into further detail to refute the specific misconduct allegations.
Later the report noted that Kent appointed Horton as CEO early in his tenure, and alleged that she was his “personal choice” for the position, stating Kent failed to consider other candidates or discuss his decision with faculty. The report did not specify why Horton was Kent’s choice. The report adds that Kent prolonged patients’ wait time in the emergency room to increase revenue by accepting transfer patients from other hospitals even when there were no beds available.
The motion noted that although Kent and Horton overlapped at prior medical institutions, this does not prove that they collaborated to further a racketeering enterprise. Horton did not respond to requests for comment.
The final point in the report claimed that Kent and Kibbe retaliated against physicians who disagreed with them or voiced questions about their policies. One example claimed that Preventza was not responding to messages from an electrophysiologist requesting that she serve as backup in surgery. The report alleged that a group of physicians raised that concern in a meeting with Preventza, and Kibbe later sent a letter to those physicians saying they “inappropriately” questioned the competence of Preventza.
According to the report, former Chief Medical Officer Chris Ghaemmaghami, the Public Directors for the Board of U.Va. Physicians Group and Emergency Medicine Physician Robert Powers, all submitted letters to former University President Jim Ryan voicing concerns about Kent’s leadership from 2020 to 2024. The report does not make clear whether Ryan took action regarding these complaints.
In contrast, the motion to dismiss called these complaints an “angry letter-writing campaign” by physicians it claimed were upset about the implementation of a “modern” compensation plan.
Jefferson Council President Joel Gardner said that the issues raised in the report were emblematic of Ryan’s presidency and what he viewed as failures on Ryan’s part.
“It was clear that profits were more important than patients to [Kent], and this really ran against the grain of many of these physicians, again, many of whom had been at U.Va. for decades, and well thought of, well respected, and they were shocked by what they were seeing,” Gardner said. “They made it known to Jim Ryan, and he did nothing about it. And that, to me, is the highlight number one of this report.”
In a response to the letter of no confidence in 2024, Ryan noted that he had been meeting with faculty to hear their concerns and taking steps internally to address these concerns. He also noted that national surveys across medical schools show that 8-9 percent of faculty are dissatisfied. A 2023 study by the Association of American Medical Colleges reported that 8.5 percent of overall responses to questions about satisfaction were negative or unfavorable.
Ryan told The Cavalier Daily that he did not wish to comment publicly on ongoing litigation.
The “evidence”
The report also included 32 letters, emails and materials as evidence to emphasize the alleged wrongdoings of Kent and which raised concerns over the quality of U.Va. Health patient care.
One letter was written by a group of U.Va. Health trustees in October 2021 and expressed that prior to Kent’s appointment as U.Va. Health Executive Vice President for Health Affairs and CEO Dec. 5, 2019, physicians had named the top priorities for the individual who would fill that position. These included building trust, creating alignment through collaboration within the health system and developing a strategic plan to properly lead U.Va Health.
In that letter, the trustees explained why Kent was not meeting those priorities, stating that Kent fired and cut salaries for many physicians during the pandemic and hired travel nurses rather than filling the over 300 vacant staff nursing positions within the health system. The report noted that the cost to pay these travel nurses was twice as expensive as it would be to pay a staff nurse.
Additionally, the trustees wrote that inexperienced physicians were stepping into senior-level roles as other, more qualified physicians stepped down due to Kent and Kibbe’s leadership, and that the hiring process for physicians was discriminatory.
“[The University Physicians Group] recently lost its top candidate for the [Chief Administrative Officer] position, an African American woman who was working in the Health System, when she chose to go elsewhere because of Dr. Kent’s lack of support for Under Represented Minorities,” the trustees wrote. “Faculty are also aware of several HR complaints against Dr. Kent for discrimination and bullying of team members.”
However, the motion says that the allegations fail to meet legal standards for negligent hiring and retention claims.
Regarding patient safety, the letter claimed that 834 patients had left the Emergency Department without being seen in August 2021. The trustees said transfer patients were being turned away who had come to U.Va. Health from nearby hospitals and staffing shortages resulted in cancellations of “elective revenue generating cases” because there were not enough staff to work with and operate on those patients.
Other documents included emails which expressed physicians' complaints about scheduling issues and concerns about patient safety within the Health System.
Now
Following Kent’s resignation in February 2025, Mitchell Rosner served as interim EVP and CEO of U.Va. health system. Rosner was appointed as CEO Sept. 12, 2025, for a three-year term. During the U.Va. Health Town Hall hosted in December, Rosner said he is working to address the physician shortage within the system and is also looking to expand healthcare access by creating a walk-in clinic on Grounds.
Kibbe left the University in July for a position at the University of Texas, and Diagnostic Radiologist Colin Derdeyn is currently serving as the interim dean of the School of Medicine.
Read More
Resigning Board members cite political pressure and defend Board’s record in letters
By Brendon Bordwine | YesterdayThe letters, sent to Youngkin Friday by Sheridan and Wilkinson, offer an articulation of how outgoing Board of Visitors members understood the internal conflicts that preceded their resignations.
Spanberger appoints 10 members to Board of Visitors
By Grace Little | 2 days agoGov. Abigail Spanberger (D) appointed 10 new members to the University’s Board of Visitors Saturday.
Student Council announces launch of a dental insurance reimbursement pilot program
By Jaylynn Perez | 2 days agoStudent Council launched a dental insurance pilot reimbursement program Dec. 2 to provide coverage for students who need to secure dental insurance.
