Out of the shadows: Professional Standards Committee hearings

To the Editor: I read with interest the accounts of de Costa, Walton, and Flynn and Atkinson dealing with the Professional Standards Committee (PSC) of the NSW Medical Board and the behaviour of the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC).1-3 I would like to add a few comments arising from my personal experience of appearing before the PSC.

The PSC is supposed to be non-adversarial. The Medical Practice Act 1992 (NSW) states that the doctor under investigation and the HCCC are not to be represented by a solicitor or barrister, but could be assisted by one. In my case, I soon realised that the HCCC Hearings Officer opposing me was dauntingly competent in court craft. She was, in fact, a very experienced solicitor who had for a long time been in practice outside Australia but was not registered as a solicitor in New South Wales. As a result of my application to the Supreme Court, this malpractice was stopped by Justices Dunford and O'Keefe.4, 5 Note that Justice O'Keefe ruled that a person qualified in law could represent the HCCC in PSC hearings, provided the person had never been registered as a legal practitioner.

I would like to pose three questions. Firstly, why was it left to me, someone inexperienced in legal processes, to call a halt to this inequity? Secondly, why did the Medical Board countenance this malpractice, when it was manifestly in breach of the Medical Practice Act and most unfair to the medical practitioners whose welfare is its responsibility? And thirdly, why did legal representatives of the medical defence organisations continue to permit this obvious imposition on the doctors whom they had been paid to defend?

In my case, evidence obtained in confidence from peer reviewers has been published in the journal of the Health Care Complaints Commission, even though the action against me has not yet come to hearing. The HCCC's practice of publishing such information prior to hearings has been sanctioned by the Medical Tribunal.6

It is my belief that the HCCC has brought the NSW medical regulatory bodies into disrepute by its malpractices, its disrespect for the wishes of Parliament and its lack of a long-term perspective.