Three former surgical-services leaders have filed a whistleblower lawsuit accusing OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center of Rockford, Illinois, of ignoring repeated neurosurgery safety complaints and punishing employees who raised them. The 18-page complaint, filed in Winnebago County Circuit Court, says patients were left under anesthesia without surgeons present and that the hospital let the problems continue.
The lawsuit was filed by Sofia Gudino, Tina Peppers and Cindamon Proffitt, who held leadership roles tied to operating-room safety, regulatory compliance and surgical operations. Their complaint says they became aware of repeated and dangerous safety violations in late 2023, but the problems they describe stretch across 2023 and 2025 and center on the hospital’s neurosurgery service line.
The filing says a neurosurgeon was seen on Oct. 12, 2023, falling asleep against the surgical microscope during a procedure, and that Peppers warned the hospital’s chief medical officer before it went forward that the surgery would be dangerous because the surgeon had worked late the previous night and already finished a full day of operations. Even so, the complaint says the procedure was allowed to proceed.
That warning sits at the heart of the case. The plaintiffs say the hospital did not treat the incident as an isolated lapse. Instead, they allege there were no investigations, no corrective actions and no meaningful response even after repeated reports, which they say left unsafe behavior in place and signaled to staff that speaking up would not change anything.
The complaint also lays out two later incidents it says showed the same pattern. On Feb. 3, 2025, it alleges two neurosurgeons left a patient under anesthesia on an operating room table for approximately one hour. On April 17, 2025, it says a neurosurgeon left another patient under anesthesia for about 37 minutes to attend a meeting while another neurosurgeon also participated. In both cases, the filing says, patients remained anesthetized with no surgeon present for a significant period.
The plaintiffs say those episodes caused prolonged anesthesia exposure and improper billing. Their complaint says patients were charged by the minute during operating-room procedures, so time spent under anesthesia while no surgeon was present was allegedly billed as OR time. That, they argue, made the overcharges fraudulent and unethical.
Beyond the billing claims, the lawsuit accuses the hospital of broader failures inside the operating room, including missed surgical counts, breaches of sterile technique, hostile behavior and erratic behavior. It also says employees who reported the concerns were targeted or retaliated against, adding a labor dispute to what is already a patient-safety case.
What makes the filing notable today is not only the list of alleged incidents, but the picture it draws of a service line that, the plaintiffs say, kept operating after staff warned it was unsafe. The complaint centers on OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center’s neurosurgery service line in Rockford and asks a court to sort out whether administrators ignored warnings, allowed risky procedures to continue and then turned on the people who complained.
OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center has not been described in the filing as having publicly answered the allegations, leaving the immediate next step with the court and with any response the hospital chooses to make. For now, the lawsuit sets up a direct test of whether the warnings were brushed aside until they became impossible to ignore.
