Protect the public
It didn’t take former massage therapist Fernando Vigon-Campuzano long to run afoul of the regulatory body that licenses him.
He received his licence to practise in March 2013. By 2014 the College of Massage Therapists of Ontario already had reasons to send an undercover investigator to his Peel Region practice to act as a patient.
She alleges he groped her. But instead of holding him to account publicly and stripping him of his licence, the college’s complaints committee chose simply to caution him behind closed doors and order him to take a remedial program.
As the Star’s Jacques Gallant reports, Vigon-Campuzano now faces three criminal counts of sexually assaulting patients, at least two of whom were allegedly abused in 2016, two years after the complaints committee dealt with him in secret.
Add this disturbing case to a long list where colleges regulating health professionals seemed to prioritize the rights of their members to practice over the safety and security of patients.
It has to stop. But sadly the half-baked changes proposed in new legislation to update the Regulated Health Professions Act won’t protect patients from abusive health professionals.
A response to persistent controversy, Bill 87 would give the health minister a say in the composition of the college disciplinary committees meant to hold health professionals to account.
That falls well short of the key recommendation in a task-force report, delivered last September, which called on the provincial government to establish a completely independent body, the Ontario Safety and Patient Protection Authority, to investigate complaints of sexual abuse by all regulated health professionals.
The report came in the wake of a series of investigative stories in the Star that detailed numerous cases of dirty doctors who were still being allowed to practice by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons.
If the oversight body existed, Vigon-Campuzano’s case, for example, would have gone to a committee of experts with no vested interest in protecting the reputations — and licences — of their members.
An independent authority, too, could help end the secrecy under which colleges too often operate. The massage therapists’ college, for example, refuses to say why it didn’t forward the undercover investigator’s allegation to a disciplinary committee rather than the complaints committee. It also refuses to say why it sent an investigator in the first place. In fact, it won’t talk about this particular case at all.
As medical malpractice lawyer Amani Oakley rightly put it: “What a violation of public trust, to let someone like this continue to practice, rather than ensuring the safety of the public and revoking his licence in a public manner, so that the message gets through to his colleagues as well.”
It’s not too late for the health minister to rethink his changes to the Regulated Health Professions Act. He must create the Ontario Safety and Patient Protection Authority so violated patients aren’t left to rely on the discredited mechanisms now in place, or the barely improved ones the province is now proposing.
Only then will the province be truly protecting the public from predatory health professionals and beginning to rebuild trust.
Health Minister Eric Hoskins must establish an independent body to deal with allegations of sexual assault by all health professionals