We’ve recently swapped 6-8 emails with a Damien Anderson, a Resolution Officer at the Health Care Complaints Commission.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the time ourselves to put these emails up on our blog or our website, but if anyone at the HCCC wanted to put them up, (which anyone who had the time could easily do,) we’d be more than happy to provide a link to them for the use of our readers, if they wanted to view them.
Two things came out of this correspondence.
Firstly, we asserted again that it seems that although the HCCC receives hundreds of complaints a year about NSW doctors, in terms of their Media Releases it appears that only about 8 of them a year are found to have not done a very good job – something that Mr Anderson hasn’t denied. How could he? – the facts are there for everyone to see.
So 50,000 doctors in NSW, and only about 8 times a year does one of them do not a very good job!!!! What a wonderful health system we have in NSW!!!!
Secondly, our initial letter was to Ms Sue Dawson, the NSW Health Care Complaints Commissioner since 7 Dec 2015, asking if things were likely to be any different under her to how they’d been under Kieran Pehm, who was the commissioner for 10 years up to 30 Jun 2015, and who had been completely and utterly hopeless – she delegated the task of providing an answer to Mr Anderson, and he didn’t respond to it in any way. Not a good sign we would have thought.
Every now and then we do a Google search to see if precedent has been followed yet and Mr Pehm has got an award from the Queen for his services to the regulation of the medical profession – so far, it hasn’t happened, but we’re sure it will.
By the way, if any of our readers think we’re particularly down on the health professions and their regulation – we’re not. We think the NSW legal profession is worse. We were talking to someone in the home building industry recently who told us that they’d had an unfortunate accident on one of their building sites for which their company had been fined $75,000, and the bill from their solicitors for handling the matter was $125,000! And someone told us recently that his son, who had just passed his final law exams, was being charged out at $400 an hour by the firm he worked for – $400 an hour to talk to a young kid or have him working on your matter, and he hadn’t even yet been admitted as a solicitor!