Patients first, not bad doctors
Doctors who have been disciplined by American medical boards can saunter back across the border to set up shop and, thanks to Canada’s secretive regulatory bodies, their Canadian patients may be none the wiser.
And the cases uncovered through an extensive Toronto Star investigation published this week don’t involve doctors disciplined for some trifle. They include the most egregious offences a doctor can commit: sexual assault of a pregnant patient; selling addictive narcotics; possessing child pornography; and a dozen surgical mishaps that left patients injured, crippled or dead.
That provincial regulatory bodies either have all this information, or the ability to get it from their American counterparts, and yet choose not to make it public, is appalling. But sadly, not that surprising.
This is just the latest evidence that self-regulation by doctors amounts to hiding their dirty laundry far more often than protecting the public.
Many Canadian physicians’ colleges say their own privacy rules prevent them from releasing information about doctors who have been disciplined.
Well, there’s an easy fix for that. Change the rules so information about doctors that should be made public, is made public. That includes who has been disciplined, wherever it may have been, and clear explanations about why. But the bigger question is why aren’t these regulatory bodies doing more to revoke the licences of doctors in these terrible cases?
Last year, a court lambasted the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for handing out a “litany of clearly unfit penalties” for doctors who sexually abuse patients. And now this latest Star investigation has revealed an even wider swath of inexcusable behaviour.
Patients deserve far better from these regulatory bodies. Even their own mandate demands better of them.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario says “this system of medical regulation is based on the premise that the College must act first and foremost in the interest of the public.”
And yet, Dr. Martin Tesher is a doctor in good standing in Ontario. He’s the Montreal-born doctor who has twice been disciplined in New York for inappropriately prescribing dangerous narcotics, and is currently before the courts there on charges related to the death of an addict from the oxycodone and fentanyl patches he prescribed.
And Dr. Stefan Konasiewicz is working in Toronto, Newmarket, Hamilton and Richmond Hill — with a spotless public record — despite being sanctioned in three American states for serious surgical mishaps.
Ontario’s regulatory body is far from the only one that is failing patients.
Quebec allows Dr. Jacques Lemire to work without telling anyone that California revoked his licence for possessing child pornography when he was a children’s kidney specialist.
And British Columbia allowed Saskatchewan-trained Dr. Gary McCallum to keep his licence — despite Washington state finding him guilty of extensive charges, including the sexual assault of a pregnant patient — as long as he didn’t work in B.C. These sorts of quiet deals are what let doctors get in trouble in one jurisdiction and essentially wipe their record clean by moving to another one.
The Catholic Church caused untold suffering when it quietly moved priests who abused children to new communities where they could start all over again. Have we learned nothing?
Once again, doctors have shown they can’t be relied on to properly regulate their own profession. It’s time for the provinces to force the matter through legislation that more clearly defines what it really means to regulate the practice of medicine in the public interest.
Self-regulation by doctors amounts to hiding their own dirty laundry far more often than protecting the public