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What are your chances of receiving an AHPRA complaint?
Medico-legal expert Sara Bird breaks down the numbers from the last year.
In 2018–19, 5.9% of medical practitioners in Australia had a notification (complaint) made about them to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), the Health Care Complaints Commission (for doctors in NSW) or the Office of the Health Ombudsman (for doctors in Queensland).
This compares to 5.1% of medical practitioners who had a notification in 2017–18.
A key message is that an AHPRA notification is unlikely to have an impact on your medical registration and ability to practise medicine.
Of the 4801 notifications about medical practitioners that were finalised in 2018–19:
- 0.5% resulted in the doctor’s medical registration being suspended or cancelled
- 74% resulted in no further action, with a further 16.1% of notifications referred to another body for management or dealt with by a health complaints entity
- 5.8% resulted in conditions or an undertaking being placed on a doctor’s registration
- 3.6% resulted in a caution or reprimand of the doctor.
There were 470
mandatory notifications made about medical practitioners, most of which involved an allegation of placing the public at risk of harm because of a significant departure from accepted professional standards.
The doctor’s medical registration was suspended, cancelled or surrendered in 3% of the mandatory notifications, and there was no further action against the doctor in 63% of the mandatory notifications.
This article first appeared on MDA National’s medico-legal blog (subscribe here) and is reproduced with its permission. MDA National recommends doctors who receive a complaint contact their medical defence organisation.
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