On June 18, 2026, the Hamilton Spectator published Joanna Frketich’s report on Dr. Stefan Konasiewicz, an Ontario neurosurgeon who built an interventional pain practice and whose six-month suspension could end as early as August. Paul was quoted in the article, not as counsel in the matter, but as an independent commentator on how Ontario’s medical discipline system weighs remediation against revocation. The report follows the discipline decision examined here earlier in the case comment on CPSO v Konasiewicz.
The article and the journalist
Joanna Frketich is the Hamilton Spectator’s health reporter, and the same journalist whose tonsillectomy coverage at McMaster Children’s Hospital has featured here before. Her June 18 piece ran under the headline “‘Red flag’ doctor could be back practising in August after death of patient,” and raised the question of whether the conditions the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal placed on Konasiewicz are adequate to protect the public.
What the article reports
Konasiewicz, 63, trained as a neurosurgeon at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto and operated interventional pain clinics in Hamilton, Newmarket, and Toronto. His Hamilton clinic, the Universal Interventional Pain Clinic at 340 York Blvd, now appears on the College register as closed. The Spectator reports that his six-month suspension began on February 10, so he could return to practice as early as August 10.
The suspension followed the death of a 70-year-old Ontario man in late 2024. According to the article, the Office of the Chief Coroner concluded that local anesthetic had inadvertently been injected into the fluid surrounding the patient’s spinal cord, after which he collapsed and could not be revived. A College committee that reviewed the death found that 16 nerve blocks had been administered over roughly a 10-minute period. It has not been made public which of the clinics provided the treatment.
The Spectator situates the death within a longer regulatory history. It reports licence issues in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, and Ontario dating to 2010, restrictions on the Ontario licence since 2022, and two earlier disciplinary findings of unprofessional conduct said to be connected to patient deaths, the first in Minnesota and the second in Ontario. A separate Minnesota patient is reported to have been left quadriplegic. Two College assessments, one shortly before the 2024 death and one after, are reported to have concluded that he failed to meet the standard of practice and showed deficits in knowledge, skill, and judgment. An April 2024 assessment by Hamilton pain medicine specialist Dr. Philip Chan is described as flagging standard-of-practice failures across most of the charts reviewed and questioning whether the nerve blocks were being performed correctly. On the article’s account, he was not ordered to stop the spinal injections until months after the death.
A January 2025 College order directed Konasiewicz to stop performing injections along or near the spinal column. The article reports that the College learned in May 2025 he was allegedly still doing them, and suspended him pending the tribunal proceeding. The suspension and the conditions that go with it were the product of a joint submission by the College and Konasiewicz. To return, he must complete education on ethics and boundaries and on certain clinical skills, practise under a supervisor who observes a minimum of 490 procedures over at least a year, and undergo a reassessment of his pain practice. On billing, the article cites a 2020 Toronto Star investigation reporting that he billed the province for nearly 40,000 procedures in a single fiscal year, and that he was the second-highest-billing physician in Ontario in 2017 to 2018. The College limited him in 2022 to no more than 45 chronic pain patients a day and five an hour.
What I told the Spectator
My comments to the Spectator were about the system, not about second-guessing the panel. The first point is that revocation is treated as a last resort. “Doctors get a lot of chances,” I told the paper. The College does not want to revoke a licence where it sees a reasonable prospect that a physician can rehabilitate their conduct and continue to practise medicine safely. The whole architecture of discipline is built to remediate where it can, and to remove the right to practise only where it must.
The second point is procedural, and it explains a lot about outcomes that the public finds hard to square with the facts. This penalty came from a joint submission by the College and the physician. A tribunal is not bound by a joint submission, but it gives significant deference to one, and the bar to rejecting a jointly proposed penalty is deliberately high. That structure exists because negotiated resolutions keep the discipline system functioning, but it also means the panel’s room to impose something harsher than the parties agreed on is narrow.
So there are two ways to read a result like this. As a member of the public, you can look at the underlying concerns and the tragic outcome and feel that it “doesn’t seem right.” That reaction is understandable. The other side, as I noted, is that a remediation order of this kind comes with a fairly rigorous structure of chaperoning, quality-assurance screening, and supervision. Whether that structure is sufficient in any given case is a fair question, and it is the question the article puts. Toronto malpractice lawyer Paul Harte, also quoted, was more pointed, questioning whether the required level of oversight is meaningful against the volume of procedures involved and describing physicians who attract one serious allegation after another as a real problem.
Discipline protects the public; it does not compensate the patient
It is worth being clear about what a College proceeding can and cannot do, because patients and families often expect more from it than it is designed to deliver. A discipline proceeding exists to protect the public and to govern a physician’s right to practise. It is not built to compensate anyone for a loss. Even the most serious disciplinary outcome, whether a suspension, conditions, or revocation, puts no money in the hands of the people who were harmed. Patients who want to understand that route can read a patient’s guide to making complaints about health care in Ontario.
Compensation comes, if at all, through a separate civil claim, and the civil claim carries its own and different burden. A plaintiff must prove, with expert evidence, that the care fell below the standard of care and that the breach caused the injury or the death. A disciplinary finding can be a signal that something went wrong, but it does not establish civil liability, and it does not prove causation. The return-to-practice-with-conditions pattern seen here is not unusual in Ontario discipline, as in Doyle v CPSO, and chronic pain practice in particular has produced other discipline outcomes, including CPSO v Nahas.
The conditions imposed on Konasiewicz, and the underlying findings and coroner’s conclusion, are matters of public record. Other details set out above are as reported by the Hamilton Spectator and, where noted, remain allegations rather than findings. The full report by Joanna Frketich is available at the Hamilton Spectator.
