A new article has just been published, on 18 Feb. 2020, by the Daily Telegraph, about which we could write a book! It includes the following;-
And this, from it’s latest Annual Report, indicates that by far the most complaints, about 200 a month, are about Medical Practitioners.
And yet, and we’ve done this exercise countless times over the years, according to it’s own media releases, out of the 200 complaints about Medical Practitioners it receives a month, it never finds more than 1 or 2 a month have done not a very good job, with perhaps another 1 or 2 a month found to have contravened sexual boundaries, and/or prescribed or handled medications inappropriately – and a lot of these have ceased practice anyway.
We’ve just done this again with it’s media releases during 2018-19. There are a total of 45, 21 in relation to Medical Practitioners. 12 have been found to have done not a very good job, 3 have been found to have criminal records, and 6 have been found to have breached professional boundaries and/or mishandled drugs or mediations.
Readers can always do this exercise themselves, from time to time – simply click on this link.
What on earth has the fact that there are more older people got to do with the fact that Medical Practitioners may or may not be treating them properly???!!!
The fact is that THE REGULATION OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN NSW, so called, IS NOT WORKING! The doctors in NSW know they can almost get away with murder, quite literally. And, undoubtedly, one of the biggest factors, if not the biggest, is the poor performance of Sue Dawson and her people.
If one wanted to be really cynical, one could speculate on whether successive NSW governments, have given successive Health Care Complaints Commissioners the brief, “Don’t find too many health care practitioners haven’t done a very good job – otherwise our people may start to think NSW hasn’t got a very good health care system.” If this brief was given to Ms Dawson, it’s hard to imagine that they could have given it to anyone better to act on it.
In terms of the above, it seems quite clear that the claim that “82 prosecutions” i.e. nearly 7 a month, were “settled” in 2o18-19 is a lie. We’ve sent Ms Dawson an email about this – not that we’re expecting her to respond.
As for the claim that 359 investigations have been finalised, what this would mean is that 359 complainants have been told they have nothing to complain about. Ms Dawson and her people are geniuses at finding excuses, some quite bizarre, for health care professionals, making medical practitioners confident, except in tiny minority of cases, that they have nothing to fear about anything the HCCC might come up with.
It’s got to the point where, if you make a complaint to a Medical Practitioner about his or her treatment of you – and it’s happened to us once – the Medical Practitioner will goad you saying, “You know you have nothing to complain about, otherwise you would have made a complaint to the HCCC,” when they know and you know that if you did, they would have the last laugh.