HARRISBURG — Some state employees have been fired and two agencies have overhauled their regulations in the wake of allegations that a doctor performed illegal abortions that killed a patient and viable infants, Gov. Tom Corbett announced Tuesday.

“It happened because people weren’t doing their jobs, plain and simple,” Corbett said.

Corbett said that four attorneys and two supervisors at the departments of Health and State were either fired or resigned on Friday and that eight other employees involved in the internal investigation remain on the state payroll. Others had previously resigned, he said.

“This doesn’t even rise to the level of government run amok,” Corbett said at a Capitol news conference at which he described his administration’s actions in the month since Dr. Kermit Gosnell and eight employees of his West Philadelphia clinic were charged criminally. “It was government not running at all. To call this unacceptable doesn’t say enough. It’s despicable.”

Corbett said the Department of State, which licenses medical professionals, has changed how it handles complaints and now requires more detailed reports. It also will train lawyers on investigative procedures, rules and regulations, and on how to prosecute complaints, he said.

At the Department of Health, which was not performing systematic checks of the state’s abortion clinics for more than a decade before Gosnell’s clinic was raided last year, yearly inspections are now mandatory, and the results will be posted on the state website.

Gosnell was charged last month with killing seven babies born alive and with the death of a 41-year-old refugee after a botched abortion at the clinic, which prosecutors have called a drug mill by day and abortion mill by night.

Prosecutors said hundreds more babies died in Gosnell’s clinic, and District Attorney Seth Williams called it a “house of horrors.”