Page 4579 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 14 December 1993
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Mr Berry's amendment, with due respect, does not deal with the issue. He provides in his amendment that there should be merely a broad description to the relevant board of the fact that there has been a number of complaints dealt with by the unit. With great respect, that information, which is non-specific, is fairly useless to the particular board. In fact, I ask Mr Berry what exactly he hopes to achieve by providing information that says, "We have dealt with 55 complaints in this month". What does it mean? The board will say, "So what?". If the board knows that it has dealt with 12 complaints against doctors, and these are the sorts of complaints that the unit is dealing with in relation to doctors, then it will help that board do its job.
I cannot see any logical reason for saying that, for example, the Medical Board should not know the nature of complaints made about doctors who are under its jurisdiction. Remember that the Medical Board is the body that has the power to discipline doctors. The Health Complaints Unit has no power to take any disciplinary steps or measures. It has only the power, as Mrs Carnell put, to mediate in these matters of complaint between practitioners and their clients. Clearly, in a real sense, Mr Deputy Speaker, the boards are still the cockpit of controlling professional behaviour, and the boards therefore must know the nature of complaints against particular practitioners. It does not necessarily identify the complainants. There is no question of the privacy of the complainant being infringed here. But it does identify the person against whom the complaint is being made.
Mr Berry: It does so. It has to do it in relation to each relevant provider registered by the board.
MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, but that is the provider, not the complainant.
Mr Berry: That is right. Why should they be identified?
Mr De Domenico: Because there might be 49 complaints about the same person.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Deputy Speaker, I am afraid - - -
Mr Berry: If they do not come within the scope of the board the board is not entitled to know about them.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!
MR HUMPHRIES: If Mr Berry does not understand why it is important for the Medical Board to know about complaints within the jurisdiction of the Medical Board against doctors, then I am afraid that he does not really understand the basic role that he plays as the person responsible for the conduct of those boards and the operation of those boards. "Heaven help us" is all I can say.
Clearly, this amendment from Mrs Carnell is very sensible. It deals with the capacity of our system to operate smoothly. I suspect that Mr Berry's philosophy in approaching this matter has been to some extent to keep the boards at arm's length in this process; to say that we are not going to involve these professional boards and we are going to leave the matter of controlling the conduct of practitioners in this town in the hands only of this unit. If this unit subsumed the powers of the board I would see there being a case for that. It does not do that. The boards still play an important role, and without the flow of information those boards cannot continue to play that role properly.
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