Medical regulation at work – Recent tribunal decisions have been published online
There are important lessons for registered medical practitioners from tribunal decisions. The Medical Board of Australia refers the most serious concerns about medical practitioners to tribunals in each state and territory. The following decisions were published recently:
- the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has cancelled a general practitioner’s registration and disqualified him from applying for registration for six years for professional boundary violations (Medical Board of Australia v Lee)
- the Western Australian State Administrative Tribunal has reprimanded a general practitioner and disqualified him from applying for re-registration for nine months for inappropriate prescribing of drugs of dependence and failure to provide adequate healthcare (Medical Board of Australia and Lim)
- the Western Australian State Administrative Tribunal has reprimanded a medical practitioner and imposed conditions on her registration after she failed to comply with conditions to attend for urine drug screening (Medical Board of Australia and Ng)
- a general practitioner has had his registration suspended and the State Administrative Tribunal in Western Australia has reprimanded him and imposed conditions after he acted inappropriately towards a member of staff at a pharmacy (Medical Board of Australia and Farrier)
- the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal has upheld a decision by the Medical Board of Australia to impose conditions on the registration of a medical practitioner who dismissed a patient’s request for a second opinion (Mahboub v Medical Board of Australia)
- the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal has imposed conditions on the registration of a general practitioner restricting him from performing certain surgical procedures (De Villiers v Medical Board of Australia)
- the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has reprimanded a general practitioner, cancelled his registration and disqualified him from applying for registration for three years for excessive prescribing of drugs of dependence and for providing false or misleading evidence (Medical Board of Australia v Vucinic)
- the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has cancelled a general practitioner’s registration for three years for breaching the conditions on his registration (Medical Board of Australia v Murphy)
- the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has cancelled a medical practitioner’s registration and disqualified him from applying for registration for 18 months, for arranging a non-registered person to issue prescriptions in the doctor’s name while he was overseas (Medical Board of Australia v Singh)
- the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal has reprimanded a medical practitioner, cancelled his registration and disqualified him from applying for registration for two years for breaching conditions on his registration (Medical Board of Australia v House)
- the State Administrative Tribunal of Western Australia has reprimanded a medical practitioner and disqualified him from applying for registration for three years for his conduct in relation to the treatment of a patient, including inappropriate prescribing of hormones (Medical Board of Australia and Whiteside)
Publication of panel, court and tribunal decisions
Ahpra, on behalf of the 15 National Boards, publishes a record of panel, court and tribunal decisions about registered health practitioners.
When investigating a notification, the Board may refer a medical practitioner to a health panel hearing, or a performance and professional standards panel hearing. Under the National Law, panel hearings are not open to the public. Ahpra publishes a record of panel hearing decisions made since July 2010. Practitioners’ names are not published, consistent with the National Law.
Summaries of tribunal and court cases are published on the Court and tribunal decisions page of the Ahpra website. The Board and Ahpra sometimes choose not to publish summaries, for example about cases involving practitioners with impairment.
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