Complaints about the regulator made to the Ombudsman increased by 40% last year, driven by anti-vaccine sentiment.
Anti-vaxxers appear to have targeted AHPRA and the medical boards over their support for covid-19 vaccine mandates, with 269 complaints made to the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman (NHPO) in November 2021 alone.
The November complaints, which accounted for 80% of the total pandemic-related complaints made to the ombudsman, started pouring in after a third-party social media post promoted the online reporting feature on the ombudsman website.
These complaints largely followed three broad themes – that it was “medical negligence to coerce someone to take a vaccine”, that doctors were being “muzzled” and that health practitioners refusing vaccination would suffer unemployment.
An AHPRA spokesman told The Medical Republic that the bulk of pandemic-related concerns raised with the NHPO didn’t pertain to its role in regulating health professionals.
“This is underlined by the fact many of these complaints were driven by a third-party’s social media post that actively encouraged people to contact the NHPO’s office in November 2021, generating a four-fold increase in approaches to its web page as described in the Ombudsman’s annual report,” the spokesman said.
“The National Boards’ statements regarding health practitioners’ obligations around vaccination did not impose new covid-19 specific conditions on Australia’s health practitioners.
“[Instead, it] sought to clarify that the same principles requiring practitioners to use their professional judgement and follow the best available evidence that existed prior to the pandemic remained.”
Ultimately, the office – which is responsible for handling complaints about the notifications and registration processes for the 16 registered health professions – declined to investigate most of the complaints.
As detailed in the NHPO annual report, the 304 complaints relating to pandemic policies were the driving factor behind the 40% increase in complaints made to the body in the 2021-22 financial year.
No other complaint categories saw a significant increase.
Of the 519 non-pandemic related complaints, 309 were about the way AHPRA and the boards handled a notification, 149 were about a registration matter and the rest were miscellaneous or customer service concerns.
Interestingly, the complaints about the way a notification was handled have continued to decrease for three years in a row; in the 2019-20 financial year there were 350 complaints, and the year after there were 344.
Two thirds of the 309 complaints about notification handling were made by the notifier themselves, who were generally patients or members of the public, rather than the health practitioner subject to the notification.
The top issues in those notifier-generated complaints include concern that a board’s decision to take no further action at the assessment stage was unfair, concern that the reasons for a board’s decision to take no further action at the assessment stage were not adequately explained and concern that there had been a delay in AHPRA managing their active notification.
Frequently, the NHPO said, it would provide complainants with more context around why certain decisions were made.
For practitioners who complained about a notification process, the main concern was that there had been a delay in AHPRA managing the notification about them; the number of practitioners who raised this concern doubled from 16 in 2020-21.
In these situations, the NHPO said it would generally come down on the side of the practitioner, agreeing that there had been unreasonable delays.
“We have found that delays, and the commonly associated lack of communication about how a notification is being progressed, can cause frustration and often distress for those involved in the notification,” the NHPO said.
In some instances, the ombudsman would provide feedback or training to AHPRA, or ask it provide an apology to the complainant.
In four cases, AHPRA or one of the boards agreed to reconsider a matter.
