Part 1: Medical Directors
by James C. Sherlock
The active presence of the medical director in a nursing home is vital to maintaining the quality of care. By overseeing medical practices, implementing care policies, ensuring compliance with professional standards, and, if required, butting heads with facility administrators and owners, the medical director plays a crucial role in safeguarding residents’ health and well-being.
Few physicians would tolerate the levels of understaffing, poor care, and dangerous policies driven by some out-of-state chains in too many Virginia nursing homes. The results include neglect, abuse, and deaths of helpless people.
Many nursing homes do a great job of caring for their residents. We thank all of you. But public data support the conclusions that in some nursing homes:
- Medical directors are not present to the extent required by the patients’ needs or by law;
- They do not effectively intervene on behalf of patients; and
- Many are overextended.
The Case of Dr. Abbasi
In March 2025, a judge in one of the multiple scandals that erupted at Colonial Heights Rehabilitation and Nursing Center (Colonial Heights) in December of 2024 was asked to decide whether a physician, arrested and charged with elder abuse for what prosecutors called a “lack of oversight of patient care” in the death of a resident, should be allowed to continue practicing medicine at the facility. The defendant, Gohar Maqsood Abbasi, MD., was both the medical director at Colonial Heights and a mandated reporter. The judge decided that oversight of the practice of medicine was the state’s responsibility, not the court’s. He was right.
In the pending criminal case, Dr. Abassi is innocent until proven guilty.
Dr. Abbasi has an active license to practice medicine in Virginia. His license data indicates that he limits his commitments within the bounds of what should be doable:
- sees patients 5 days a week and spends 60% of his time at his primary practice address in Chester,
- participates in Medicare and Medicaid and accepts new patients in both,
- is subject to no Virginia Board of Medicine Notices or Orders, and
- has paid no malpractice claims.
Facilities licenses show he serves or has served as medical director at three nearby nursing homes:
- He was replaced as medical director at Colonial Heights (Lifeworks Rehab chain) effective 2025-12-08, a year after the raid. Colonial Heights averages 137 residents per day,
- Henrico Health & Rehabilitation Center (Lifeworks Rehab), 108 residents per day. As Virginia’s only Special Focus Facility, Henrico Health and Rehab is designated by the state as, over time, the worst nursing home in the Commonwealth, and
- Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center (Marquis Health Services), 177 residents per day, whose residents suffered the Commonwealth’s largest loss of life during COVID.
He discloses affiliations (see below) with:
- Group: Prime Care Health Services PC,
- Hospitals: John Randolph Medical Center and Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center, and
- Nursing homes: Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center and Henrico Health & Rehabilitation Center.
While the government charges Dr. Abbasi with malfeasance, the publicly available records do not help its case.
He was not overcommitted. Two days a week serving as the medical director for those three facilities should have been sufficient. While the facilities did not help him by reporting that no medical director was on payroll, Medicare, for some unfathomable reason, allows direct provider billing for medical director services rather than facility billing.
But the case raises complex and important questions well beyond this one instance about the enforcement of laws and regulations governing nursing home medical direction.
Public records provide both answers and questions. The conflicts among reports from the same providers are legion. But they speak loudly enough, even with and often especially because of the conflicts, that no commentary is required or offered.
It is the government’s business to deal with the issues raised.
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