Australian Doctor Australian Doctor 30th June 2017

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30 JUNE 2017
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Doc guilty
of forging
consent
ANTONY SCHOLEFIELD
AN “extremely paternalistic”
doctor has been suspended
after forging 37 signatures
on consent forms for surgery
because he didn’t want to
burden his patients with
paperwork.
Obstetrician and
gynaecologist Dr John Adams
had “effectively taken away
the patient’s ability to exercise
an informed consent” and put
his fellow doctors at risk of
lawsuits, the Victorian Civil and
Administrative Tribunal said.
Dr Adams had been
performing elective operations
at Sandringham Hospital in
Melbourne when he forged the
signatures.
He said he was “dismayed”
when he discovered in 2012
that consent forms for patients
booking an operation with him
would be expanded from one
page to eight.
Many of the forms were
incorrectly filled in and his
patients with poor English
required an interpreter to go
through the forms, which
wasted time, he said.
These factors prompted him
to “cut out the middle man and
fill in the form himself”, he said.
The police were alerted a
year later, when some of Dr
Adams’ patients told hospital
registrars the signatures on
their consent forms were not
theirs.
The patients were not aware
of the deception, but all had
satisfactory operations and
Antibiotic alert
Thousands of GPs rapped for high prescribing
JOCELYN WRIGHT
MORE than 5000 of the nation’s
highest antibiotic-prescribing GPs
have been targeted with a letter from
the Chief Medical Officer asking them
to curb their prescribing.
Individual letters warning about
antibiotic resistance have been sent
to the top 30% of antibiotic prescrib-
ers based on PBS data, detailing how
their prescribing ranks compared with
other doctors in the area.
“You prescribe more antibiot-
ics than 97% of prescribers in [your
area],” reads one letter seen by Aus-
tralian Doctor.
The letter lists the raw numbers and
types of antibiotics prescribed by the
GP in the year up to April 2017 and
estimates their antibiotic prescribing
‘You prescribe more
antibiotics than 97%
of prescribers in
[your area].’
— Excerpt from the letter
sent by the Chief Medical
Officer.
as a rate per 1000 consultations, based
on their Medicare claims.
“The PBS data has been provided
to you as a prompt to consider your
prescribing behaviour,” Professor
Brendan Murphy writes.
He cites a recent fatal case of a
patient with an untreatable Klebsiella
infection in the US and urges GPs to
prescribe antibiotics only when they
are clearly needed.
The mail-out also includes GP prac-
tice posters from NPS MedicineWise
that encourage doctors and patients
to avoid inappropriate prescriptions of
antibiotics.
“If we lose those remaining antibiot-
ics we might end up potentially with
untreatable infections,” says Professor
Murphy says.
A spokesperson for the Department
of Health says the GP letters are part of
the National Antimicrobial Resistance
Strategy, which calls for “increased
awareness and understanding of anti-
microbial resistance … through effec-
tive communication, education, and
training”.
The department says it will continue
to monitor antibiotic use by GPs iden-
tified as overprescribers. These GPs
may receive further correspondence
from them or NPS MedicineWise in
the future.
The letters have provoked mixed
reactions from GPs on social media,
with some saying they are another
example of GP bashing, while others
suggest the warnings will be ignored
because they do not take into account
the type of practice a GP works in.
Dr Tim Senior, a GP working in an
cont’d page 4
DOCTORS WITH
DISABILITIES
Dr Hannah Jackson
is one of three
doctors behind
a new campaign
group aiming
to break down
barriers.
News Review,
page 11
cont’d page 4
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