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March 9, 2008
It bothers me that state governments do little about Medical Boards that fail to regulate the medical profession to ensure public safety and quality of care. The regulatory medical boards are simply not doing enough to protect patients from the adverse events caused by incompetent, predatory, drug-dependent and unstable doctors.
So we have the well known cases of Dr. Death at Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland, the "butcher of Bega"--Graeme Stephen Reeves---in NSW; and in Victoria, and the dermatologist Dr David Wee Kin Tong. In all three, the regulatory medical boards, 'the watchdogs', have failed dismally in their duty to protect the public, and they have evaded their responsibility to ensure public safety.
Greg Roberts
Self regulation has long been argued by the medical profession in particular as being the preferred method of maintaining standards of care. In the case of the medical profession, this has largely been achieved through the learned medical colleges. The above examples are recent examples of the failure of medical self regulation
There is a convention in the medical culture that the medical regulatory authorities, professional colleagues and administrators overlook adverse events medical mistakes and complaints that medical practitioners were acting outside the bounds of appropriate professional conduct.The medical mistakes remain a professional matter and the medical disasters are covered them up.
As The Age editorial says in relation to the Reeves ruining the lives of scores of women by mutilating their genital organs with surgical procedures that were usually botched and often unnecessary:
But even worse than the actions of one criminally careless and dangerously deluded doctor is the fact that a brotherhood of fellow practitioners failed to stop him. In fact, it seems that the quaint, cosy system of self-regulation Australian doctors enjoy actually helped to bury the truth about the damage Reeves inflicted on women placed in his care.Other surgeons called in to attempt to repair Reeves' botched operations knew who was responsible but it appears that they — and other hospital staff — preferred to observe a code of silence of the sort usually associated with organised crime: an appalling silence that is completely at odds with the Hippocratic oath doctors swear but which too many of them seem to regard as a relic.
The editorial ends by saying that it is vital that a fearless, independent regulator has the power to investigate doctors who abuse patients' trust. On this, physicians cannot be expected to heal themselves. Governments must act.
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Gary,
I see that the NSW Health Minister, Reba Meagher, announced yesterday that she would seek to introduce laws making it mandatory for doctors to inform on colleagues they suspected were guilty of sexual abuse, drug or alcohol abuse while practising, or of gross misconduct.