We received an important message from Dr Joanna Flynn, the Chair of the Medical Board of Australia today.
After serving the Board for nine years, Dr Flynn has decided to leave the Board this month following a tumultuous period within our medical profession which is in crisis of losing public trust.
Dr Flynn, in her farewell message, said: “For me, it’s all about trust. Patients in Australia consistently report high levels of trust in their doctors, despite falling levels of trust in experts and institutions. They trust us to be competent, honest and reliable. As well, patients want us to care, to be compassionate and kind.”
Yes, trust, competence, honesty, compassion and kindness are all virtues ingrained in our proud medical tradition, but in the last few years, we saw the relentless pursue of kind and caring doctors by AHPRA and the Medical Board, pressuring them to the brink of depression, self-harm and suicide.
As one doctor said: “How many doctor suicides does the board and AHPRA need to take this seriously? As a governing body for doctors there seems to be no advocacy for the rights of the individual doctor.”
This kind of behaviour would ultimately bring our profession into disrepute, and we are determined to stop it.
We have been a very tolerant and resilient group of people who have tried to cooperate and reason out with AHPRA and the Medical Board, but we have reached a tipping point where we have no choice but to petition our call to the Health Minister for urgent reform to stop this bullying practice with a proposed list of effective remedial actions.
The main events following our ‘please explain’ correspondence were
- The response from Mr Martin Fletcher, CEO of AHPRA, trying to reassure the doctors that AHPRA would ‘want the [regulatory] process to be humane and respectful’, and
- The farewell message from Dr Joanna Flynn, that “…we are now facing new challenges. We are focused on engaging more strongly with the profession and the community, getting clearer about how we assess risk, improving the experience of notifiers and practitioners involved in complaints and evaluating our effectiveness in protecting patients.”
We shall now wait and see whether Mr Fletcher will walk the walk or just talk the talk.
We want to see AHPRA demonstrates effective measures to stamp out vexatious complainants and apply the necessary steps to deter people from abusing our regulatory system which is primarily established to protect patients and their caring healthcare providers, not tormenting those who practise good medicine while covering up for those who bully their victims.
AHPRA and the Medical Board need to earn back public confidence in our medical regulatory system.
If Mr Fletcher could not deliver what he preaches, then it would be an honourable thing for him to follow Dr Flynn’s footstep, and allow more competent and more compassionate people to run our regulatory organisation.
Again, we would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to the 2100 people who have supported us in this petition and we will only claim victory once our Health Minister has successfully reformed AHPRA and the Medical Board.
We also wish to acknowledge the concerted effort made by organisations like AMA, HPARA, colleges, MDOs etc, publishers like Australian Doctor, Medical Observer, doctorportal etc, and individuals like Drs Steel Scott, Don Kane, Leong Ng, Gary Fettke, Charlie Teo, Paddy Dewan, Dom Greco etc. to stop bullying in our healthcare industry.