News Review
DOCTORS ARE HUMAN TOO
Health, relativ die: the big is
Was 2017 a vintage year for Australian healthcare, or was it beset with the usual of trials and tribulations? Australian Doctor looks back on a fascinating 12 months.
Dr Geoffrey Toogood.
Sussan Ley.
No, Minister REMEMBER Sussan Ley, our former federal Minister for Health?
The start of the year was highly turbulent for the one-time punk amid a raft of media stories about her parliamentary travel expenses that included high-cost private flights she flew herself.
It wasn’ t the best look, especially at a time when she was preaching the need for patients and doctors to suffer the chills of the continued Medicare freeze.
Ms Ley, who as a young woman added an‘ s’ to her first name after a numerologist told her she would lead a more interesting life, resigned as minister in January, later giving an emotional farewell address to Parliament where she insisted her flights were all within the rules.
While her actions were seen to have failed the‘ pub test’, she did receive backing from a Department of Finance investigation, which found that the only rule she breached was when she used a government-funded car to go from her hotel to an apartment, a trip that lasted five minutes.
When the history of Australian health ministers is written, Ms Ley will go down as the one who officially ditched the GP copayment and once wore a menacing rubber glove for a front page cover feature in The Australian under the headline‘ The minister will see you now’.
It was, however, all overshadowed by the way in which her career crashed to Earth.
Just not Crickitt More than seven years after killing his wife by injecting her with a lethal dose of insulin, Sydney GP Dr Brian Kenneth Crickitt was sentenced to a minimum 20 years in prison.
Dr Crickitt, who denied the murder charge, had Googled the words‘ insulin’ and‘ fatal’ a few days before his wife died. He then used one his elderly patient’ s insulin prescriptions to obtain the drug from a local pharmacist.
Codeine wars and a guilded rage The TGA decision to ban over-the-counter codeine was supposed to end the long-running argument between doctors and pharmacists about the damage the drug was inflicting. Instead, it led to one of the biggest public stoushes of the year.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia cranked up its V8 lobbying machine and went to work on state and territory health ministers to create special‘ exceptions’ to the TGA’ s up-scheduling that would ensure the continued sale of codeine for patients with acute pain.
Doctors’ groups accused the guild of putting profits before patients, pointing out that the actual codeine doses available OTC were at sub-therapeutic levels, so what they were flogging was largely useless for its intended purpose anyway.
But logic and politics mix like oil and water. In the background, former federal minister Santo Santoro was recruited by the guild as a lobbyist to spread its message in the corridors of power.
Within months, things started to shift in ways that must have left doctors’ groups a little breathless, when state and territory health ministers signed a letter to the federal health minister expressing concern about the looming up-scheduling.
Bizarrely, even Tony Abbott took a break from his man-made global warming studies to share his views on the topic.
At the time of writing, the guild’ s Christmas wish still appears elusive; a public declaration by the states to introduce the requested exemptions to the TGA’ s ruling is yet to happen.
Hero of the year He didn’ t cure cancer, but Dr Richard Zhu achieved a major medical breakthrough in 2017.
Frustrated by the lack of information for GPs and patients, the unassuming Sydney doctor created a website listing gap fees for Australian specialists.
It was simple, unprecedented— and quickly became controversial.
Dr Zhu had been making calls to specialist clinics across the country between his own patient consults to gather details of initial consultation costs.
When his work hit the national media, he was described as a“ divisive lone wolf” by one specialist critic.
But he was supported by patient groups and other doctors, and the not-for-profit website has turned out to be a winner, gaining more than 800,000 hits since its launch in March.
Big issue of the year: doctors’ health 2017 will be remembered as the year when doctors’ mental health finally became a priority issue for the medical profession.
It was forced into the spotlight in March following revelations that four doctors had ended their own lives over the summer.
Among them was 29-year-old Dr Chloe Abbott, a junior medical officer at St Vincent’ s Hospital in Sydney and Dr Andrew Bryant, a senior gastroenterologist based in Queensland.
Vowing that no more doctors should suf-
6 | Australian Doctor | 15 December 2017 www. australiandoctor. com. au