Inquiry flood shakes doctors

HAMILTON - New Zealand doctors are facing a crisis of confidence, according to a Hamilton surgeon.

Health Waikato thoracic and vascular surgeon Ross Blair told the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons' annual congress in Melbourne yesterday that doctors were badly shaken by inquiries into their work.

"The crisis in New Zealand has been a series of problems, a bit like the cervical cancer inquiry in Gisborne, which goes back to the National Women's Hospital inquiry [into cervical smears], which was a tremendous blow to the confidence of the profession and the self-regulation of the profession," Mr Blair said.

"There is a crisis in the sense that there is a real risk that this might end up with an increase in legislation to try to control the profession."

The answer was not to swamp doctors with new laws and regulatory bodies or encourage patients to sue, he said.

The threat of legal action would only make New Zealand doctors join their Australian and United States colleagues in buying expensive indemnity insurance with money that could have improved patient care.

Instead, there should be quality control and auditing by doctors and independent people.

"I think that we do need to have some outside balance. There's no question of that. It's a matter of how much."

Doctors' moral obligations to their communities should encourage them to maintain standards, Mr Blair said.

The Gisborne inquiry into cervical screening by pathologist Michael Bottrill risked turning into a witch-hunt, with the public forgetting Dr Bottrill did not cause the cancer.

"If some good comes out of it, it might impress on health officials that more money has to be spent on quality control and audit," Mr Blair said.

Medlab medical director Brian Linehan agreed medical professionals were suffering a crisis of confidence.

"I think we're sort of getting beyond the era where the public and GPs automatically accept that what comes out of the lab is right," he said.

People needed to accept that doctors did sometimes make mistakes.

He said a positive outcome of recent inquiries was the acceptance that medical professionals, particularly those in rural areas, needed to have their work double-checked.

- NZPA