According to the Australian Medical Association, a national doctors register will actually jeopardise patient safety. The AMA is urging tomorrow’s meeting of Commonwealth, State and Territory leaders to reconsider plans for a national register, reports the ABC.
But the AMA surely can’t expect its claims to be taken seriously.
The profession has long dressed up challenges to its own interests as issues of “public safety and professional autonomy”. This time its argument is a distraction from something which is a real threat to patient safety: the patent failure of self-regulation of the medical profession.
Recent cases of medical malpractice, such as the so-called “butcher from Bega”, raise a question: why should the health sector be treated so differently to the aviation sector? After all, the deaths and harms being inflicted on patients in the health sector would not be tolerated in the aviation industry.
The failure of medical self-regulation to protect the public shows that it’s just not working, and that there is a pressing need to overhaul medical practitioner regulation in Australia. There is a consensus on this point in policy circles.
CoAG has been moving towards some national regulatory mechanism to ensure that the medical boards and profession are held accountable for their failure to ensure the safety and quality of health care. The states have been pushing for the regulation of medical and non-medical health professionals through the mechanism of national registration and accreditation.
However, these CoAG reforms struck the big rock of professional self-regulation. My understanding is that the Howard Government sided with those health professions who fought to retain professional self-regulation and to prevent regulation because it would undermine professional autonomy. The Coalition government under Howard did not have the political will and courage to challenge this resistance to modernising the medical profession.
My judgement is that the recent publicity around a string of high profile medical disasters will provide a political opportunity for a more reform-orientated Rudd Government to act on national registration. They will give it higher priority, make stronger moves to regulate the health professions, and tie this in with workforces shortages.
Timing, they say, is everything in politics. CoAG is meeting tomorrow in Adelaide. If the opportunity is there to regulate the health profession, will the Rudd Government and the states have the political will and courage to do so?
The answer may depend upon how much support the AMA’s powerful publicity and lobbying machine can marshall, particularly from other health professional groups.
Gary Sauer-Thompson writes at Public opinion. He is also the political and policy advisor for the Chiropractic Association of Australia (National).
What the hell, no not the attack on the entrenched medical specialist. At the age of ten score years and cinq, every time I see a specialist, medical that is, they charge so that another two hectares are added to their vineyards.
What the AMA hides is that its executives have a vested interest in this because they are on their own State medical boards – Dr Capolingua, for example, is well remunerated as a member of the Medical Board of WA, a conflict she doesn’t declare to media.
Its time COAG, courage!
THEN: states agreeing to national hospital performance data; can’t just look at professionals as the right hospital data can illuminate management cultures as well as budget spend. Its well past time.
Medical “misadventure” is a more common form of injury or death than the glamorised “Road Toll”, yet medical “professionals” claim to be beyond critical analysis or common-sense restructures. Wholesale reform of the medical INDUSTRY is required.
I’m sure Government-appointed bureaucrats will do a much better job. Remember it was they (not the medical board) who covered for Jayant Patel.