Our medical insurers and our safest doctors
should not be forced to subsidise the
insurance premiums of those whose clinical
practice skills are consistently known
to be sub-standard. These 'frequent flyers'
need to be identified by their boards
and re-trained to an acceptable standard
of clinical competence.
But our medical boards have remained
conspicuously silent throughout.
It can no longer be considered acceptable
for our medical boards to ignore such
glaring professional flaws as alcohol
abuse, drug addiction, or psychiatric
impairment. Flawed doctors are in dire
need of early intervention, psychological
support, and medical treatment. Such treatment
already exists and has proven successful
in assisting impaired doctors but medical
boards must take steps to identify problem
doctors and immediately move them into
other safer, non-patient areas of medicine
until fully rehabilitated.
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The introduction of random drug testing
into medicine through the pro-action of
our medical boards would be a desirable
and long overdue patient safety strategy.
So why is this obvious need not being
addressed?
Public expectation is that the medical
profession should be subject to, at minimum,
the same codes of safety that pre-exist
within other professions, industries,
sports, schools, jails, and on our roads.
Shane Warne was banned from his profession
for 12 months - but he does not supervise
the health and well-being of other Australians.
What our medical boards need to realise,
is that impaired doctors are also patients
- with incidental medical degrees. They
cannot become empowered to receive support
and rehabilitation until our medical boards
cease ignoring them and encouraging them,
through neglect, to remain in hiding.
Every patient has the right to expect
that our medical boards are policing the
safe performance of their doctors. And
this means that every patient should be
able to assume that all board-registered
physicians are sober, drug-free, and competent.
Unfortunately for us, they are not.
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