It’s time to end abuse by doctors

What will it take for Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins to do the right thing and create a strong, independent body dedicated to investigating complaints of sexual abuse by regulated health professionals?

A task force report last September called for setting up just such an independent body. But Hoskins did not follow that recommendation, which would likely have angered doctors and other health professionals who are determined to wash their own dirty laundry. Instead, he introduced watered-down changes to the Regulated Health Professions Act that would merely give him more say in the composition of disciplinary panels that deal with complaints of wrongdoing by physicians.

Now even that half-measure is coming under attack from the Ontario Medical Association, which represents the province’s doctors. The association doesn’t like the idea that under the legislation the panels could be made up predominantly of members from outside the health profession. If Hoskins hoped that his half-measure would appease doctors, he was wrong.

All the more reason, then, for him to drop the gloves, stop tinkering and act boldly to ensure zero tolerance for sexual abuse in the profession. He should, in short, start worrying less about appeasing the doctors and focus more on protecting patients.

To do so he should establish the Ontario Safety and Patient Protection Authority the task force called for. It’s badly needed.

For too long, disciplinary panels of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons have failed to revoke abusing doctors’ licences. In too many cases they have allowed doctors to get away with sexual assaults that would have landed them in jail if they had done them on the street rather than within office walls.

Indeed, they have been so lax about their responsibilities to victims that in January a court called out the college’s discipline committee for handing out a “litany of clearly unfit penalties” for abusive doctors.

The case before the court — which the judges sent back to the discipline committee for another goround — involved Toronto physician Javad Peirovy.

He was finally suspended by the discipline committee last April (but only for six months) for groping the breasts of four female patients in 2009 and 2010. A panel of three Divisional Court judges called his punishment “clearly unfit . . . to protect the public and vindicate the integrity of the profession.” Disturbingly, he is now back practicing, with some restrictions.

Peirovy’s case was one of many unearthed in an investigative series by the Star that resulted in Hoskins creating the task force in the first place.

Doctors have now demonstrated that they can’t be relied on to properly discipline members of their own profession. But the answer isn’t to control the membership of the disciplinary panels, which after all do deal with other issues that may require clinical judgment or medical expertise. The answer is to leave those other issues in the hands of disciplinary committees and set up the independent authority for sex abuse cases.

Too many doctors have been getting away with abuse for far too long. It’s time for Hoskins to do the right thing and toughen up his legislation.

Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins should establish an independent body to investigate complaints of sexual abuse by doctors