Why I left AHPRA to help practitioners

6 minute read


As a lawyer working for the regulator, I learned how much pain could be avoided with a little training. That’s a gap I’m seeking to fill.


My name is David Gardner, and I’m a lawyer who works in health regulation. I’m excited to have the opportunity to contribute to The Medical Republic.

Over the coming months, I will be providing my thoughts on numerous legal matters in the medical space, from much-needed legislative reform to notable court and tribunal decisions, as well as advocating for change.

It’s more than a decade ago now that I first walked through the doors at AHPRA, first as an investigator in Adelaide, then progressing to leadership roles in Sydney and Melbourne. Somewhat surprisingly, I loved it – after years of unrewarding work as a lawyer, I had finally found work that was meaningful and important.

That working at AHPRA might be enjoyable may shock some of you; it certainly shocked my friends and family who are in the health professions. Many of them saw AHPRA as the enemy and my move there as something of a betrayal.

The reason it felt meaningful, and why I enjoyed it, is that the work of AHPRA and other regulators is vitally important. It helps protect patients and keeps the reputation of the health professions – and especially the medical profession – high. Doctors are frequently featured at the very top of lists of the most trusted people (unlike lawyers), and that is in no small part due to the efforts of regulators to maintain appropriate standards of conduct.

That does not mean that AHPRA is perfect. It’s far from it. During my time there, numerous issues arose which demonstrated the serious adverse impact that it was having on the lives of practitioners and, ultimately, the wider public. Numerous times at AHPRA, we had discussions to the effect of “Are we the baddies?” owing to the obvious harm we were causing to some people.

It must be said that it isn’t possible to safely regulate a profession without causing harm to some practitioners. Practitioners who are unsafe to practise need to be restricted from being able to work, so that they do not cause harm to the public. Some harm to those practitioners is inevitable because it is a very confronting and distressing thing to be removed from practice, and although that is often a tragic and sad situation, it is one that can unfortunately be necessary.

My concerns really arose from the harm we were doing to everyone else. Problems of delay, regulatory overreach, and poor-quality decision-making were frequent and led to very difficult conversations with practitioners and the public where it would be challenging to explain how things had gone so wrong (and of course, without explicitly saying that things had gone wrong).

My discomfort at the frequency and severity of those issues led to my departure from AHPRA and, at the start of 2019, setting up my own firm focused on helping practitioners. As far as I know, I am the only lawyer in Australia who focuses on this area who is entirely independent of the insurers, and the experience has been eye-opening.

Over the past six years, it’s been a privilege to assist so many doctors with the challenges they’ve faced. What has become apparent to me, however, is how often people are breaching their obligations without realising it.

So often ethics and legal obligations are taught with the opening “You won’t need to worry about this because you won’t do the wrong thing …”. I believe that this sets people up for failure. Practitioners who deliberately and knowingly do the wrong thing are rare – far more common are people who do the wrong thing inadvertently.

It’s a rare week when I don’t hear from a practitioner who has erred – sometimes seriously – without realising it until it was too late. In almost all cases, that practitioner is well-meaning, skilled, and an asset to the profession. That is also true of practitioners I have assisted in professional misconduct cases in tribunals – many of them are fantastic and skilled professionals. They are far more than their mistakes.

It has led me to frequently wish that I had been able to speak with them before they stepped off the right path. So many of my clients would not have needed a lawyer at all if someone had helped them understand their obligations first.

It has also become clear to me that my impact will always be reduced if I am only acting for individual practitioners. As one single person, I will never be able to assist enough people to have a broad impact on the profession.

For that reason, I have been transitioning from working on individual matters to working in spaces where I can have a wider impact. Contributing to TMR is one way of doing that, and I’m excited that I will be able to speak to a wider audience here.

I have also started a new education/CPD business, Australian Health Professional Development, or AHPD for short (www.ahpd.com.au).

AHPD is focused on teaching practitioners about their ethical and legal obligations, and how they can stay on the straight and narrow without risking their career.

We’ve recently launched our first course on social media obligations, and we’ll shortly be launching further courses on professional boundaries, AHPRA’s advertising guidelines, and what to do if you receive a complaint to AHPRA.

My ultimate aim is to try and reach more people and help them avoid the pain and distress of having to go through AHPRA’s notification processes, and instead allow practitioners to focus on their work and their patients.

I’d love to know if there are any particular issues that you’d like me to write about – if so, please let me know in the comments!

David Gardner is a lawyer, and a former manager and investigator at AHPRA. In addition to his legal practice, he is the director of AHPD, a new CPD provider of high-quality education to doctors on largely neglected non-clinical topics.

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