A leading health consumers group says it is appalled by the secrecy surrounding complaints of misconduct by doctors in the ACT.
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The Healthcare Consumers Association of the ACT says it was met with an "impenetrable" wall of silence from the ACT board of the Medical Board of Australia when it asked about a serious case.
The Canberra Times revealed last month that a local doctor facing more than 70 complaints about his conduct was still practising more than 16 months after a decision was made to seek emergency orders to stop him seeing patients.
The board refused to publicly discuss the case, despite the man being the most complained about doctor in the territory since records began and being considered a danger to public safety.
He is the second medical practitioner revealed to be still practising despite posing a risk to the public in the view of authorities. But the media is barred from revealing the identities of either of the men to their patients or potential patients.
The Healthcare Consumers Association weighed into the debate yesterday, with spokeswoman Janne Graham saying the group was amazed at the level of secrecy surrounding the ACT branch of the Medical Board of Australia.
"We are appalled by the delays in that case. When we started to look into it, we were amazed with the impenetrable nature of the whole process and the nature of the medical board and what it does and how it operates in the ACT."
The veteran healthcare advocate said the ACT's branch of the board was years behind NSW in openness and accountability. ''The NSW board has a website and from it you can identify who is on the boards and what cases they have reported to them and the outcomes of those cases," Ms Graham said.
Under the national uniform scheme for regulation of health care reforms, introduced in July last year, the system in each state and territory was to be overhauled. But Ms Graham said that change was not coming to Canberra quickly enough.
"We understand that with the new national scheme there was to be a time lag, but the NSW board has been able to get itself organised, while the ACT board seems to have just disappeared," she said.