What we NSW health care services consumers have to put up with under the Baird government in general, it’s Health Minister, Ms Jillian Skinner in particular, and our Health Care Complaints Commission!
After a Dr Colin Moore had performed three lots of surgury on one of his patients during 2007 and two more on 23 and 30 July 2008, she had to be taken by ambulance to a hospital from which she was only released after 13 days during which she had had four further operations.
So how did our health systems handle this? Well, it took almost six years, but on 12 Mar 2014 the HCCC did issue this Media Release, almost six years after Dr Moore’s last two operations. And guess what? He was reprimanded! Whoopee! It reminds one of the old saying – “like getting slapped on the wrist with a wet lettuce leaf.”
Oh, and he was ordered to go back to Med School and complete a course, where, no doubt he would be doing it surrounded by 3rd and 4th year medical students, which might have been a bit of a bother to someone in his 70s, who’d been a doctor for more than 50 years.
But wait, there’s more!
If you go to Dr Moore’s details on the web, which we did a few minutes ago, (on 17 May 2015,) you see this.
Wow! So impressive! So many letters after his name!
The letters are explained later on his website by this.
Still, after more than 14 months after the HCCC’s media release!
So readers, if you ever thought that by consulting and using a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, or a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, or a Fellow of the Australasian College of Cosmetic Surgery, you wouldn’t end up consulting and using someone like Dr Moore, this may not be necessarily be so.
And if you’ve ever thought that Mr Baird, our Premier, or Ms Skinner, our Health Minister for Health, or Ms Goward, our Assistant Minister for Health, or Mr Pehm, ourHealth Care Complaints Commissioner might care about any of this, that may not be necessarily be so either. Over the years we’ve emailed them perhaps even hundreds of times and are yet to get any indications that any of them care. (If any of them feel aggrieved by us saying this, perhaps they could let us know what they’ve done, and/or what they doing, and/or what they are going to do.)
The good news about this is that, with the help of modern technology, so much of all this is IN OUR HANDS. There’s so much useful research we can do, and blogs like this can help, we hope.
The people we feel sorriest for are the health care professions trying to do a really good job, up against competition from those who are not so good.