Saturday 9 April 2016

Illegal cost cutting at Canberra Public Hospital

Here are Schedule 4 drugs prescribed for a public hospital inpatient prescribed by someone who is not a doctor and allegedly had no legal right to chart these drugs.
Hospital administration allegedly claimed that the prescriber was being supervised from a distance by a doctor (That doctor had not seen the patient and had no knowledge of their medical details.)

Medical regulators refused to take any action against the doctor who allegedly claimed to be providing distant supervision with no knowledge of the patient. They also declined to take action against the prescriber, who allegedly was in effect impersonating a doctor.

Rumour has it that doctors turned a blind eye to this cost cutting in exchange for some fee-for service medical specialists being allowed to engage in a form of double dipping, which continues to this day. There is no doubt that there was a temporal relationship between the two activities.