Kuljit S. Hundal is an emergency room physician who held medical staff membership at Adventist Health Medical Center Tehachapi in Kern County. He provided ER services at the hospital as an independent contractor under an agreement with Stallion Springs Medical Services, a medical corporation responsible for staffing and scheduling the hospital’s emergency department. In March 2019, a patient posted a social-media complaint alleging Hundal yelled at her and twice told her to leave the ER after she refused lab work.
The hospital’s chief of medical staff opened an investigation and directed Stallion Springs to pull Hundal from the ER schedule pending review. Stallion Springs complied, conducted its own investigation — including interviews with Hundal and coworkers — and then terminated its contract with him for cause.
Hundal sued the hospital, the hospital’s medical staff, and Stallion Springs, alleging none of them gave him notice or a hearing before he was pulled from the schedule, in violation of Health and Safety Code section 1278.5, California’s hospital peer review statute (Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 805–809.9), and the common law right of fair procedure, plus a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. The hospital and its medical staff later settled with Hundal and were dismissed from the case, leaving Stallion Springs as the sole remaining defendant on the fair procedure and emotional distress claims.
Stallion Springs moved for summary judgment or, alternatively, summary adjudication, arguing it owed Hundal no duty of fair procedure because it is not a “peer review body” under the statute and is not the kind of quasi-public organization to which the common law fair procedure doctrine applies. The Kern County Superior Court granted summary adjudication on the emotional distress claim but denied it on the fair procedure claim. The court gave no explanation for its ruling either during the unreported hearing or in the written order that Stallion Springs’ own counsel was directed to prepare, and the Court of Appeal separately noted that omission fell short of the statement-of-reasons requirement in Code of Civil Procedure section 437c(g), though it found the omission harmless given its own de novo review.
In the published case of Stallion Springs Medical Services v. Superior Court (Kuljit S. Hundal, Real Party in Interest), No. F090834, Super. Ct. No. BCV-21-100159 (Cal. Ct. App., 5th Dist., Sept. 2026) the Court of Appeal, Fifth Appellate District, granted the Stallion Springs petition for writ of mandate. It directed the trial court to vacate its order denying summary judgment and to enter a new order granting Stallion Springs’ motion for summary judgment in its entirety.
The panel explained that the common law right of fair procedure, as articulated by the California Supreme Court in Potvin v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co. (2000) 22 Cal.4th 1060, protects against arbitrary decisions only by private organizations that are “quasi-public” in nature — entities such as labor unions, hospitals, and professional licensing bodies whose importance to the public, market power, or legislative recognition justify imposing due-process obligations beyond any contract. Stallion Springs argued the doctrine was displaced entirely in the physician-discipline context by California’s peer review statute, relying on the Second District’s recent decision in Asiryan v. Medical Staff of Glendale Adventist Medical Center (2024) 100 Cal.App.5th 947, which held the statute is the exclusive source of procedural protections for physicians subject to hospital peer review. The Fifth District found it unnecessary to resolve that broader question, deciding instead on narrower grounds that the fair procedure doctrine simply does not reach an entity like Stallion Springs as a matter of law.
The court reasoned that Stallion Springs, as a staffing company that contracted with physicians as independent contractors to fill hospital shifts, was not “tinged with public stature or purpose” the way a union, hospital, or licensing organization is, citing the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Flaa v. Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. (2022) 55 F.4th 680, and this court’s own decision in Yari v. Producers Guild of America, Inc. (2008) 161 Cal.App.4th 172.
It was undisputed that Stallion Springs had no power over whether Hundal retained his medical staff membership at the hospital — that determination belonged to the hospital alone — and that Stallion Springs was contractually obligated to remove him from the schedule once the hospital so directed. The court rejected Hundal’s argument that Stallion Springs’ role in staffing and scheduling amounted to “gatekeeping” authority sufficient to trigger fair procedure duties, noting Potvin itself requires that the organization’s power be so substantial that removal significantly impairs a physician’s ability to practice in an entire geographic area, and Hundal lost privileges at only one hospital.
The court distinguished Economy v. Sutter East Bay Hospitals (2019) 31 Cal.App.5th 1147, noting that case addressed a hospital’s own liability for routing a peer review decision through an intermediary medical group, not the intermediary’s independent duties, and that here there was no evidence Stallion Springs had any peer review policies of its own. Because Stallion Springs was never a “quasi-public” gatekeeper to the profession, the panel held, the trial court erred as a matter of law in denying summary adjudication of the fair procedure claim, entitling Stallion Springs to summary judgment on the entire case.