A hospital's medical executive committee—the group of high-ranking doctors in a hospital that  generally decide who gets privileges and who doesn't—can be sued as an entity separate from the hospital, a federal judge has ruled, pointing to a “clear trend” in New Jersey law.

U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler of the District of New Jersey, sitting in Camden, said a medical executive committee is a legal entity that can be subject to a lawsuit.

“We find that the medical executive committee has the capacity to sue or be sued,” Kugler said in Nahas v. Shore Medical Center in a ruling dated April 27.

The dispute involves an endovascular surgeon, Frederick Nahas, who has been seeking to have his privileges reinstated at Shore Medical Center in Somers Point after pleading guilty to a crime, according to the court.

Nahas received his license to practice medicine in 1978 and was granted vascular surgical privileges at Shore Medical Center. In 2002, he pleaded guilty in federal court to a charge of preventing, obstructing, misleading and delaying the communication of information and records relating to a health care investigation, according to court documents.

Nahas was sentenced to one month in prison, three months of home confinement, 100 hours of community service, and three years of probation, and was fined $20,000; in 2003, Shore Medical Center suspended all of his privileges for three years. In 2005, the state Board of Medical Examiners suspended his license for nine months, according to the documents.

His license to practice was restored in 2006. Since then, Nahas has been attempting to have his full privileges restored at Shore Medical Center. The hospital's medical executive committee (MEC), which comprises department chairs, at-large members and other physicians, have granted him some privileges, but not all of the ones he had before his guilty plea, Kugler noted.

Nahas sued the hospital and the MEC, but the MEC argued that it could not be the subject of a lawsuit since it was not an entity subject to litigation.

Kugler disagreed.

An MEC, Kugler said, is a “decision-making entity,” and can be sued.

“When an association is sufficiently distinct and its membership is distinguishable from the entity, it can be found to be an unincorporated association with the capacity to be sued,” Kugler said.

“Although this court has misgivings about the analytical rigor of treating a group of people on a committee as a singular committee for purposes of legal capacity, the clear trend under New Jersey law is to regard such groups as unincorporated associations,” Kugler said.

Neither Nahas' attorney, Perth Amboy solo Jacqueline Bittner, nor the hospital's attorney, Edward Fanning Jr. of Newark's McCarter & English, returned calls seeking comment.