Doctors would have the full details of any historical disciplinary findings and criminal charges against them divulged on AHPRA’s public register under proposed amendments to the National Law underpinning the regulation of health practitioners.
The idea is among a raft of proposed reforms put forward for public consultation in an options paper released on Monday (August 6), which seeks to ensure the National Law is “up to date and fit for purpose” following its creation in 2010.
The report includes an option of expanding the information that will be included on the AHPRA Register of Practitioners to include a full disciplinary history that lists findings of other regulators, criminal charges and convictions and bail conditions.
The consultation paper notes there have been calls to increase the public’s ability to discover adverse findings against their healthcare practitioner in the interests of transparency. Such calls have come from Medical Board of Australia chair Dr Johanna Flynn and Professor Ron Paterson, the author of last year’s independent review into the use of chaperones in medicine. The Paterson report concluded that “the limited information being published was insufficient” and “patients should not have to resort to Dr Google to find information about a doctor’s previous disciplinary or criminal record for sexual misconduct”.
In response to the Paterson review, the Medical Board announced in March 2018 that the practitioner register would start to include web links on a doctor’s entry to all tribunal decisions and court rulings about that practitioner. But following an outcry, the Board compromised and agreed to only put links to tribunal cases where there had been an adverse finding.