The AdvoKayte Podcast: Holding Healthcare Accountable!
~ with Attorney Kay Van Wey.
Kay Van Wey has worked for over 40 years to hold the American healthcare system to account. Too often, Kay has seen the effects of an industry that puts short-term profits ahead of the health outcomes of their customers, the American people.
The people need a space where their voices can be heard. In court, Kay Van Wey has gotten their cases heard and has successfully tried hundreds of cases of medical malpractice, negligence, and neglect. Now, in her own small way, Kay wants to help amplify and clarify those voices.
Welcome to AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable, a podcast series dedicated to exposing and reforming the rot that has taken hold in the roots of the health care system.
“As I have always said and believed, most doctors are good doctors — and good people. But the system for how we identify, report, and stop bad doctors is failing patients. The tragedy of the Christopher Duntsch story is that so many patients were harmed before he could be stopped. This is just incomprehensible and unacceptable.”
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable: Series Season 1 Finale.
In BONUS Episode 2 of AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable, Kay Van Wey sits down with Laura Beil, the investigative journalist and host of Wondery’s Dr. Death, to talk about what most people miss. This story was labeled “true crime,” but Laura explains why it was never really a whodunit. It was a why-was-this-allowed. Laura learned about reporting on Dr. Death, what happens when healthcare is treated like a business, and why transparency is still so hard for patients even when they’re trying to do everything “right.”
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Who will regulate the regulators, guard the guards, or police the police? What would lead hospitals to hire, credential, and empower bad doctors? Why, in this day and age, would a game of musical bingo lead to a death in what should be a simple surgery? Nearly every member of the No More Dr. Deaths Club weighs in on a case of malpractice bingo in this bonus episode of AdvoKAYte.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Expert medical credentials consultant and civil litigator Anne Roberts is back again. This week Anne Roberts and host Kay Van Wey trade some of the worst healthcare and malpractice horror stories from their long careers.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Anne Roberts is back to talk about how tort reforms and ineffective reporting practices have made patient safety even more precarious in a system designed to promote the security of the business of medicine over patient safety. Anne and Kay exchange and explore examples of how the tort reforms of the early 2000s and a lack of political leadership at all levels make it harder to hold health care providers to account and ensure safer healthcare for all.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Patient safety should not be political, but patient safety so often comes down to policy. Hear what some states do to bring protections to the system to make it safer for everyone. Anne Roberts is a lawyer and an expert consultant on healthcare staffing and hospital privileging. Anne joins Kay to talk about the good and bad systems in healthcare and how sometimes looks and even best practices can be deceiving when it comes to what is good and bad in healthcare. This episode is the first of a very generous two-part interview.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Doctors Robert Henderson and Martin Lazar are back for the second part of an electrifying interview covering how dangerous characters like Christopher Duntsch can inflict their malpractices on unsuspecting patients. In an important and wide-ranging interview, the doctors reveal many of the social and economic pressures that actively contribute to systemic failures in healthcare. These are the things most of us wouldn’t even think to think about when we think of how bad actors become Dr. Death.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Dr. Henderson and Dr. Lazar discuss the lessons learned from Dr. Death and implications for doctors and patients
Charter members of the No More Dr. Deaths Group, Dr. Robert Henderson and Dr. Martin Lazar, return to the AdvoKAYte podcast to talk with Kay about what they learned from their involvement in the Christoper Duntsch case about the challenges our medical systems face trying to regulate and police themselves.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Kay is joined by Lisa McGiffert, who leads the national non-profit organization Patient Safety Action Network, which was founded by Consumer Reports. Lisa has worked at all levels of the system, from local health boards to state and national legislative bodies. In an interesting and fast-paced interview, Lisa describes her 27-year career as a professional advocate for higher public healthcare standards, bringing transparency to practitioner records, ensuring the quality of healthcare devices, and creating better and more stringent accountability methods to improve patient safety.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
There was a serial killer loose in Dallas. It took a long time and a lot of people to stop him. Michelle Shughart was one of those very important people. Michelle was the first prosecutor to get a life sentence against a doctor in a criminal malpractice case. Where civil authorities would only push the problem of a neurosurgeon with patient outcomes that sometimes included mutilation and death from town to town and hospital to hospital, Michelle managed to put that problem in jail. This is the story of how she did it.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
What happens when the database of bad practitioners that was designed to inform and protect our health care system is routinely undermined by the very institutions it was designed to protect? Dr. Robert Oshel, former Associate Director for Research and Disputes for the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) tells us about the Data Bank, why it was founded, how it is used, and why it ultimately fails to protect patients from the malpractice of bad practitioners.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Credentialing and Peer Review are linchpins of patient safety in a health care system that is responsible for vetting and monitoring the people who are allowed to practice in it. This episode features medical staffing expert Anne Roberts who, over a thirty-year career, helped develop national standards in best practices around vetting and credentialing doctors, surgeons, and other medical practitioners. Anne explains the credentialing and peer review processes and helps us understand how the system works and how it can be exploited. It is a fascinating and sometimes disturbing look at how the medical system takes care over the people who take care of us.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Welcome back to AdvoKayte. What should a responsible person do when confronted with something so obviously wrong it simply can’t be overlooked by someone who considers themselves to be a responsible person? After he ascertained the unbelievable, that Christopher Duntsch was a trained neurosurgeon who was licensed to practice in Texas, Dr. Henderson tried to get someone in authority to stop Duntsch. Sadly, most part, local, state, and even federal medical and law enforcement officials didn’t know what to do with the Duntsch case, so they passed the buck to the next office, leaving Dr Henderson extremely frustrated and increasingly alarmed. Dr. Henderson walks Kay through a litany of other seemingly responsible offices and authorities who consistently passed on taking responsibility for Duntsch.
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Welcome back to AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable. In Part Two of this riveting episode, Kay Van Wey continues her conversation with Dr. Robert Henderson as he shares the aftermath of his decision to speak out about Dr. Christopher Duntsch. Despite enormous resistance, Dr. Henderson persisted—filing reports, contacting medical boards, and ultimately helping bring a dangerous surgeon to justice. This episode dives into the consequences he faced for blowing the whistle, the failures of peer review systems, and the systemic flaws that allow unsafe physicians to continue practicing.
AdvoKayte: Episode 2: November 19th, 2025.
Speaking Out Against Dr. Death: Dr. Robert Henderson’s Fight for Patient Safety: Part 1:
AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
In this powerful episode, Kay Van Wey sits down with Dr. Robert Henderson, the spine surgeon who took a stand and helped expose one of the most shocking medical scandals in modern history: the Dr. Death case. Dr. Henderson shares his firsthand account of how he became involved in the case of Christopher Duntsch, what he discovered during the revision surgery that changed everything, and the moment he realized he had a duty to speak up—no matter the cost. Despite immense pressure, personal risk, and a system designed to protect physicians over patients, Dr. Henderson chose truth and transparency. His courage not only protected future patients but also helped ignite a national conversation about medical oversight, credentialing failures, and the urgent need for reform.
Welcome to the very first episode of AdvoKAYte: Holding Healthcare Accountable.
Hosted by nationally recognized medical malpractice attorney Kay Van Wey, this podcast is dedicated to empowering patients, families, and caregivers to navigate today’s complex healthcare system.In this episode, Kay shares her personal journey—from her small-town roots to becoming a leading advocate for patient safety. Best known for her role in the infamous Dr. Death case, Kay opens up about why she’s spent over 40 years fighting for justice and why this podcast is her next step in making healthcare safer for everyone.
Kay Van Wey is nationally known for her fight to get justice for victims of Christopher Duntsch, a Texas neurosurgeon who earned the nickname Dr. Death for not following proper procedures while performing surgeries under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Duntsch left 31 patients permanently maimed. He killed 2 others. In the process of representing a number of Duntsch’s patients in court, Kay exposed the utter lack of protection offered by regulatory bodies charged with protecting patients from negligent doctors and other forms of medical malpractice.
Now serving the equivalent of a life sentence near Huntsville Texas, Duntsch won’t be eligible to apply for parole until 2045 when he will be 74 years old. His victims will suffer for the rest of their lives. The system that closed ranks behind Dr. Death continues to protect bad actors in health care? It continues to grind on, revictimizing survivors of medical malpractice.
“There are things that I’ve seen, and things that I know after all of these decades of doing this work that other people need to know.”
“Ultimiately, I’m trying to make my own little dent in the universe. I’m trying to do something that can help people. That’s the jist of it.”
Kay teaches classes at law schools on medical malpractice. Her and law partner Luke Metzler speak at legal conferences across the country. Her life ambition is to not only raise the issues surrounding medical malpractice as loudly and openly as possible but to use her knowledge of the truths behind the American medical system to push that system to the point where it has no option but to reform itself. This series of podcasts gives her an even larger venue, one that lets her speak directly to the people most affected by the intricacies of bad actors in health care, the American public.
“I don’t want to call it a calling, that’s too strong but, it’s my life’s purpose. It’s my life’s work, it’s my life’s purpose.”
Join Kay Van Wey and co-host Kalee Dionne Pair as they explore aspects of our health care systems most of us don’t know exist. We’re going to talk about the cover-ups, the profiteering, the legal and legislative frameworks that protect bad actors and the massive health care corporations that hire and enable them.
“Don’t look at your feet, just dance.” - sign taped to Van Wey’s computer monitor
As they often say, it’s not the error as much as it’s the attempts to pretend it never happened. Kay knows it happens. She’s experienced it personally and has dedicated her life to fighting for people suffering from what should be preventable, avoidable injuries from trusting someone committing medical malpractice. It happens more often than you want to think. Together we demand better, safer care. Every patient matters and every patient’s story matters. We’re going to tell them. Please join us.
Advokayte: Season 1.
Dr Death
- Episode 1
Why this Podcast? - Episode 2
Interview w/ Dr Robertson P1 - Episode 3
Interview w/ Dr Robertson P2 - Episode 4
Interview w/ Dr Lazarus - Episode 5
Interview w/ Anne Robert - Episode 6
Interview w/ Dr. Oshel - Episode 7
Interview w/ Prosecutor Shughart - Episode 8
Interview w/ Lisa Geifert - Episode 9 No More Dr. Deaths: Why Hospitals Still Protect Dangerous Doctors
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