In a previous post on this subject we bemoaned the fact that it seemed the so called regulatory authorities and profession bodies wouldn’t lift a finger to do anything about NSW doctors treating the legal requirement that they provide their patients with copies of their health records and information as a joke – we may have mentioned that we wrote to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commissioner, Kieran Pehm, about this, and despite also sending him 3 or 4 “I’m wondering if you got this email?” emails, it took him more than 8 and a half months to reply, (admittedly, no surprise to those who have had anything to do with Mr Pehm and his HCCC,) and the reply was, “Not our problem – try these other people.” And these other people were the Office of the NSW Privacy Commissioner – and they have been tried, and now we are a bit more optimistic, although it’s still very early days.
On 7 Aug 2015 a letter was sent by mail to the IPC by one of our readers complaining that he’d sent about 10 emails to Dr Andrew Brooks asking how he got the copies of the health records and information to which he was entitled and they’d all been ignored. And yesterday he got a letter by email back from them saying that they had been in touch with Dr Brooks’ office. But this is a paragraph from the letter indicating how far they’d got!!!!
In other words, their email is set up so that it can detect the difference between emails from patients and those for “administrative purposes” and when it detects that an email is from a patient, it doesn’t actually receive it!!!!!!!!????????
This led to a letter being sent back to the IPC including this paragraph:-
The question is raised as to whether Dr Brooks and/or his practice manager are having mental health problems.
It will be interesting to see if they are ever held to account for their rubbish – probably not very likely. When they tell the IPC this sort of stuff, expecting them to believe it, one can only imagine what they tell patients.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that the IPC will turn out to be like other similar organisations like the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission and the Medical Board of NSW and accept Dr Brooks and his Practice Manager’s explanation as being perfectly rational – that letters sent using the ordinary email address shown on their website are just not received, because this email address is set up so that only emails for “administrative purposes” are received, and it detects when emails are from patients and screens them out and they are not received. Not that there’s any warning to that effect on their website.
It’s would be a bit like when a complaint was made that a Dr Jassim Daood was/is claiming on his website to be a Fellow of an impressive sounding organisation that turns out not to exist, the HCCC and Medical Board dismissed the complaint on the basis that Dr Daood had presented evidence that he IS a Fellow of an organisation that doesn’t exist, to the point that “the Commission and the Council are satisfied that Dr Daood’s claims in relation to his qualifications and memberships are warranted and appropriate.”