This is an extract from a recent online article.
Whoopee!
The problem, Mr Secord, is that the whole of the NSW Medical Profession is, to all intents and purposes, completely unregulated.
(Of course, so are lots of other NSW professions and trades – solicitors and builders being classical examples that we know a lot about from personal experience.)
The definition of a “surgeon” could be tightened and tightened by an act of parliament, and this in itself wouldn’t make a scrap of difference. We have a Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 too, and thousands of NSW doctors, perhaps the majority, take no notice of it, even those working for the government, and you can write to the NSW Minister of Health Jillian Skinner drawing this to her attention, as we have done, and she won’t lift a finger to do anything about it.
And as for the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission – well it’s completely and utterly ineffective. We can give you a very recent example as evidence of this.
A Dr Jassim Daood is claiming on his website to be a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh and a Member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, but if you email these organisations, as we have done twice, they both come back very quickly with, “We’ve never heard of this bloke.”
So we emailed Dr Daood about this and he didn’t even acknowledge our email, let alone send us a reply.
It is our very strong opinion that this was all that we needed – only a madman would consider consulting and/or using the Dr Daoods of this world in these circumstances. You want to be dealing with doctors who are into communication and who are upfront and honest, and if they won’t even acknowledge simple emails about their qualifications, that’s the end of the story.
But in this instance – goodness knows why – we went further. We wrote to Mr Kieran Pehm, the NSW health care complaints commissioner about this, thinking that perhaps he might be a bit concerned, as we were, about the widespread false and misleading claims by doctors about their qualifications – he simply passed it on to his underlings, and, guess what, they came up with an excuse to do nothing as they always seem to do. They said that Dr Daood had been able to convince them and the Medical Council of NSW that he had the qualifications he was claiming. No details were to be released of how he’d convinced them – we were to trust the HCCC and Medical Council, he obviously hadn’t been able convince the Royal College of Surgeons and the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery. But, anyway, the bottom line, as usual – COMPLAINT DISMISSED!