Lubbock OB-GYN says she was ‘bullied’ out of position, as patients struggle to find care

Coon told KCBD she and Dr. Amy Richards are the only two OB-GYNs in Lubbock employed by UMC Physicians rather than Texas Tech Physicians. She said Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center has to sign off on hospital credentials and privileges before any doctor can work inside UMC, and that approval process is where things broke down for her. In the outpatient setting, UMC Physicians backed her and her clinic staff, but the hospital side proved different. She said TTUHSC grew upset with her and Richards, though the excerpt cuts off before explaining exactly why.

The dispute matters because it touches who gets to deliver babies and handle women's health care inside one of Lubbock's main hospitals. With Coon stepping away, patients who relied on her are now left searching for a new OB-GYN in a city where, by her own account, only two doctors held her kind of employment arrangement.

For women already in the middle of pregnancy or ongoing treatment, losing a doctor over an administrative fight between a hospital system and a physician group is not an abstract problem. It means scrambling to find someone new, fast, in a specialty that does not have a lot of slack to begin with.

Her tenure ended over a credentialing dispute neither UMC nor Texas Tech has fully explained.