Get tougher on bad docs

Finally. A court has called out the discipline committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for handing out a “litany of clearly unfit penalties” for dirty doctors.

The case before the court — which the judges sent back to the discipline committee for another go-round — involved Toronto physician Dr. 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 back in 2009 and 2010.

He is, unbelievably, now back practising at Ultimate Diagnostics in North York.

The panel of three Divisional Court judges called his punishment “clearly unfit . . . to protect the public and vindicate the integrity of the profession.”

No kidding. Even the College of Physicians itself thought the penalty was inappropriate.

It launched the court case against its own disciplinary panel to force another hearing.

The bottom line is that disciplinary panels have been permitting physicians to get away for far too long with sexual assaults that would have landed them in jail if they had done them on the street rather than behind their office walls.

In 2014, for example, a Mississauga physician, Sastri Maharajh, admitted he had assaulted as many as 13 female patients by placing his mouth or resting his cheek on their breasts.

Regardless, the college allowed him to continue practising after suspending his licence for only eight months, as long as he only treats male patients.

That ruling was made despite the proven difficulty of enforcing sex-based restrictions on a doctor’s practice.

Consider another male doctor, Sharif Tadros, found guilty of sexually assaulting female patients. He was allowed to continue to practise if he treated only male patients, but was later found to be treating women.

All of this hasn’t gone unnoticed by Health Minister Eric Hoskins.

But so far his efforts to ensure zero tolerance in the profession for sexual abuse have not gone far enough, fast enough.

After a 2014 Star investigation into doctors still practising despite sexual abuse findings, Hoskins took a promising first step and established a task force to review the 1991 Regulated Health Professions Act, naming the respected human rights lawyer Marilou McPhedran to head it up. But then he ignored two of the task force’s key recommendations. One was to require the revocation of a physician’s licence for any form of sexual abuse. That’s something the college has also asked for. But the legislation Hoskins introduced in December to overhaul the act would simply expand the current list of banned sexual acts.

That, as one critic put it, leaves the impression that some sexual assaults are still OK. And it continues to give too much leeway to the college’s disciplinary panels.

The second ignored recommendation was to create an independent Ontario Safety and Patient Protection Authority that would take sexual assault allegations completely out of the hands of the college’s discredited disciplinary panels.

Importantly, the authority would not only have handled sexual assault allegations for the College of Physicians, but for all regulated health professionals.

With half-measures in the new legislation, Hoskins appears to be bowing to the powerful physicians’ lobby.

He should put patient safety first and implement all of the task force’s recommendations.

Health Minister Eric Hoskins must do more to ensure patients are safe from sexual abuse by doctors