A parliamentary inquiry has called on the medical profession to better warn prospective patients and to publicly identify doctors who’ve come to the adverse notice of the SA Medical Board.
Parliament’s Legislative Review Committee this week recommended the Medical Board make information available on its website about doctors with limited registration. All doctors in SA have to be registered with the Medical Board.
Some doctors and surgeons have only limited registration, meaning that they could, for example, not be allowed to prescribe opiates or work throughout the state. Other doctors’ registration is limited because they may have mental or physical health problems.
More than 800 SA doctors have limited registration. Democrats MLC Sandra Kanck said yesterday that by withholding information, the board was protecting doctors at the expense of patient safety.
“The board had not followed previous recommendations passed down by the committee,” she said.
She said the committee wanted the board to publish on its website the names of doctors whose registration had been suspended or cancelled, together with the reasons, and showing medical practitioners’ current conditions or limitations.
“I checked the Medical Board’s website over a period of nine days,” Ms Kanck said. “It showed me the Medical Board has thumbed its nose at the Legislative Review Committee.”
Medical Board CEO Joe Hooper said the board was not in the business of hiding information. He said technical issues and privacy concerns limited its ability to publish information on its website. “The board acts in the public interest to ensure public safety. There is at times tension between a doctor’s privacy and the public’s right to know,” Mr Hooper said.
Ms Kanck remains dissatisfied by that explanation. “I can understand there would be privacy issues, but sometimes the lack of information available to the public can result in patient safety being compromised,” she said.
The Victorian and Queensland medical boards have detailed information regarding limited registrations on their websites. The Australian Medical Association backs the board’s stance in SA, saying the public is adequately protected.
AMA state president Peter Ford echoed the board arguments. “There needs to be a balance between the doctors’ privacy and the public interest,” Mr Ford said.
“If a doctor is stable on anti-depressant medication and therefore their registration is limited, they may be less risk than a person who has depression and is not being treated.”
Last month another body, the Medical Professional Conduct Tribunal, barred SA doctor Gurmit Dhillon indefinitely from practice for secretly snapping photos of women patients’ genitalia.
The doctor had taken the photographs while giving spinal injections. The Medical Board had suggested he be banned from practice for eight years, but the Professional Conduct Tribunal said that would not be sufficient protection for the community.
The tribunal found that 65 year-old Dr Dhillon, who’s now serving a 14-month non-parole period for two counts of indecent assault and 15 counts of indecent behaviour, had humiliated and distressed nine victims.
District Court judge Terry Worthington said Dr Dhillon abused his patients’ trust. “It was his habit to ask them to remove their lower underwear even though that was unnecessary. The resulting exposure of the patients’ genitalia was to satisfy prurient interest,” he found. But while Dr Dhillon was reprimanded by the Medical Board three years ago, the doctor continued to see and assault patients until his name was removed from the register of doctors a month later.
The information was made available in the Medical Board’s 2006-07 annual report, but it did not name the doctor. Liberal MP Rob Lucas said publishing cases of public interest in the Medical Board’s annual report was too late.
“The committee has requested that this information be made available immediately and any other cases of interest in relation to medical practitioners,” he said
Email a friend
Favourites
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Digg
StumbleUpon
MySpace
Reddit
Newsvine
LinkedIn
Kwoff
Twitter