Regulation of Health Practitioners (LAWS70401)

Over the past few years there have been profound changes in the regulation of the health professions. Fourteen professions are now included in a new national scheme and others may join them. All of the registered professions are covered by the same legislation for accreditation, registration and the monitoring of practice, to ensure that standards are maintained to protect the public. More than half a million health practitioners are registered under the national scheme and, when it was adopted in July 2010, 66 acts of parliament were repealed and about 85 health professional boards were abolished. This subject will provide a detailed examination of the new scheme, which has centralised the disciplinary process, with the state and territory registration bodies acting under delegated authority from the federal board. The subject will also provide an understanding of how health practitioners, their employers and educators have a mandatory obligation to report ‘notifiable conduct’ of practitioners to the national regulator, and how healthcare consumers (patients) lodge a ‘notification’ about the practice of a health practitioner, rather than a ‘complaint’. The course will also scrutinise how unregistered practitioners are now regulated in some jurisdictions and will analyse how practitioners’ conduct is regulated by consumer protection legislation, which precludes certain forms of misleading advertising about services.

Principal topics include:

• Legal requirements for accreditation, registration and monitoring of practice of health practitioners in Australia
• The process and grounds for disciplinary action
• An examination of specific disciplinary proceedings against health practitioners, looking at issues of conduct, health, performance and fitness
• A comparison of disciplinary proceedings and other legal action against health practitioners
• Analysis of the regulatory mechanisms applicable to unregistered practitioners
• An evaluation of the new registration scheme and its operation to date
• A review of consumer protection actions that can be taken against health practitioners, both those who are registered and those who are not.