Nearly 1,000 women have filed a major class action lawsuit against Chesapeake Regional Medical Center (CRMC) seeking approximately $10 million in damages each over unnecessary gynecological surgeries. The litigation involves approximately 907 plaintiffs, with 123 additional women recently joining the case, bringing the total claimed damages to over $9 billion. The lawsuits center on decades of misconduct by Dr. Javaid Perwaiz, an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed unnecessary hysterectomies and sterilizations on patients without proper medical justification, while the hospital allegedly enabled his conduct despite mounting evidence of improper practices.
This represents one of the largest class actions involving healthcare fraud and negligence in recent years. The allegations extend beyond the doctor himself to the hospital’s leadership, who are accused of ignoring warnings about unnecessary surgeries, continuing to grant medical privileges to Dr. Perwaiz despite concerns being raised, and failing to intervene despite knowledge of the improper procedures. The case illustrates a systemic failure of institutional oversight that left patients vulnerable to exploitation and permanent bodily harm.
Table of Contents
- Who Is Dr. Javaid Perwaiz and What Happened?
- What Were the Unnecessary Procedures and Hospital Negligence?
- How Many Women Are Involved in the Lawsuit?
- How Much Money Are Plaintiffs Seeking in Damages?
- How Did the Hospital Enable This Conduct Over 40 Years?
- The Arrest and Federal Conviction
- What This Case Reveals About Hospital Oversight Systems
Who Is Dr. Javaid Perwaiz and What Happened?
Dr. Javaid Perwaiz worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center from the 1980s until his arrest in 2019. During this 40-year tenure, he performed hundreds of unnecessary gynecological surgeries on women, including hysterectomies and sterilizations that had no medical justification.
In many cases, these procedures were irreversible, leaving patients permanently unable to bear children or suffer significant complications from surgery they did not need. Perwaiz was convicted of healthcare fraud and is currently serving a 59-year federal prison sentence. His conviction was based on evidence that he systematically misdiagnosed conditions to justify surgeries that benefited him financially through billing and increased medical fees. Court proceedings revealed a pattern of deceit in patient care, where medical necessity was fabricated to rationalize invasive procedures.
What Were the Unnecessary Procedures and Hospital Negligence?
The unnecessary surgeries included hysterectomies—the removal of the uterus—and sterilization procedures performed on women without legitimate medical indication. Many of these patients did not have cancer, life-threatening conditions, or severe gynecological disorders that would warrant such drastic interventions. In some cases, patients sought routine consultations for minor concerns and left with permanent surgical alterations to their bodies.
Chesapeake Regional Medical Center is accused of institutional negligence in allowing this conduct to continue for decades. Hospital administrators allegedly ignored warnings about unnecessary surgeries, continued granting medical privileges to Perwaiz despite concerns being raised by staff or other physicians, and failed to intervene despite knowledge of improper procedures. This institutional failure compounded the harm done by the individual physician, as the hospital’s oversight systems—designed to protect patients from exactly this type of misconduct—broke down completely.
How Many Women Are Involved in the Lawsuit?
The litigation involves approximately 907 women as plaintiffs, with 123 additional victims joining the case recently. This ongoing growth in plaintiff numbers suggests that more women are coming forward as awareness of the lawsuit spreads and victims discover they may have been harmed. The case began with smaller numbers of plaintiffs but has expanded significantly as more women realized they underwent unnecessary procedures under Perwaiz’s care.
The sheer volume of plaintiffs underscores how widespread the misconduct was over his 40-year career. Unlike cases involving a single harmful incident, this litigation reflects systematic abuse across hundreds of patients over multiple decades. Each plaintiff has her own medical history, her own unnecessary surgery, and her own resulting physical and emotional consequences from procedures that should never have occurred.
How Much Money Are Plaintiffs Seeking in Damages?
Each woman in the class action is seeking approximately $10 million in damages for her injuries and losses. With nearly 907 plaintiffs, the total damages claimed in the litigation exceed $9 billion.
These damage amounts attempt to compensate for permanent bodily harm, lost reproductive capacity, emotional distress, additional medical treatment required to address surgical complications, and the lifetime consequences of unnecessary medical intervention. Damage calculations in these cases consider multiple factors: the permanent nature of many of these surgeries, the lost opportunity to have biological children, recovery costs from complications, ongoing psychological trauma, and the long-term health consequences of unwarranted surgical procedures. A $10 million per-plaintiff demand reflects the severity and permanence of the harm—this is not a case of temporary injury but of life-altering damage inflicted through medical abuse.
How Did the Hospital Enable This Conduct Over 40 Years?
Hospital administrators are accused of enabling Dr. Perwaiz’s misconduct by failing to enforce standard patient safety protocols and physician oversight mechanisms. When warnings about unnecessary surgeries were raised, they were not investigated adequately or acted upon with urgency. The hospital continued granting and renewing Perwaiz’s medical privileges despite credible concerns about his clinical judgment and patient care decisions.
This institutional failure represents a breakdown of multiple safety systems that hospitals maintain to protect patients. Peer review committees, utilization review programs, and credentialing bodies all exist specifically to catch patterns of unnecessary or harmful treatment. The fact that these systems failed for 40 years suggests either they were not functioning as designed, they were overridden by other priorities, or administrators chose to ignore red flags. This type of systemic negligence compounds individual physician misconduct into institutional liability.
The Arrest and Federal Conviction
Dr. Perwaiz’s conduct came to an end in 2019 when he was arrested. Following investigation, he was convicted of healthcare fraud, and is currently serving a 59-year federal prison sentence.
The conviction was based on evidence presented at trial demonstrating the pattern of unnecessary surgeries and false billing practices that enriched him while harming patients. His conviction provides legal confirmation of what the plaintiffs have alleged about the nature and intentionality of his misconduct. However, the criminal conviction of the physician does not address the hospital’s institutional failures or compensate the victims. That is the purpose of the civil litigation—to hold the institution accountable and provide financial compensation to those harmed.
What This Case Reveals About Hospital Oversight Systems
The CRMC litigation illustrates how healthcare institutions can fail their most basic obligation to patients: ensuring that medical care is necessary, appropriate, and performed by qualified providers acting in the patient’s interest. Hospital credentialing systems, medical executive committees, and quality assurance programs exist to prevent exactly this type of abuse. When these systems fail silently for decades, entire populations of patients can be harmed.
The case also demonstrates that individual physician misconduct can be hidden within institutional structures that value reputation, revenue, or provider relationships over patient safety. In this case, a prolific surgeon generating significant billing volume may have escaped scrutiny that would have been applied to a less productive physician. The litigation’s $9 billion damage claim reflects not only individual physician liability but institutional negligence that allowed predatory behavior to continue unchecked for 40 years.
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