Compelling Safety: Reforming Australian Treating Doctors' Mandatory Reporting Obligations

Depending on the Australian jurisdiction in which they are practising medicine, doctors have different mandatory obligations to report to regulatory authorities those doctors whom they are treating if their doctor-patients have engaged in ‘notifiable conduct’. Some of those obligations are not new and have been introduced due to perceptions that doctors are reluctant to notify regulators about other doctors who endanger patients. Nevertheless, the ways in which the obligations are framed within the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme — the current regulatory scheme for registered Australian health practitioners — have been controversial, with good reason. Inconsistencies between doctors’ obligations in different states and territories have caused confusion, concern has been expressed that some obligations may deter doctors from obtaining health care, and exemptions from the obligations for doctors in two state jurisdictions potentially inhibit regulators’ capacity to protect the public and assist doctors. To address these problems, this article proposes changes to treating doctors’ mandatory reporting obligations, which redefine the conduct that treating doctors are required to report, permit treating doctors to fulfil their mandatory reporting obligations by reporting certain notifiable conduct either to regulators or to national doctors’ health services, and apply mandatory reporting obligations to doctors uniformly across Australia.