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Medical boards are not addressing the problems within their own profession

By Karel Lyons - posted Monday, 31 March 2003


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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About the Author

Karel Lyons is Manager of Patient Injury Support & Advocacy.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Karel Lyons
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