Report on performance
Scenario 5
This is from a Federal Court case where the applicant is seeking an adjournment of the hearing to enable him to prepare his case. The discussion is around the role of a PSR committee.
Transcript of part of the discussion with the applicant practitioner reads:
Practitioner I was being - I was tried by a panel of doctors who had no rules of evidence. They accepted what evidence suited them. They rejected which didn't suit them. And they ignored which didn't suit them, and they discredited which didn't suit them. And as such, I consider that I was being assessed by a very biased panel, and that they had the job to prosecute regardless. If I had been assessed by a panel of true peers who did not have an in‑built bias against a doctor like myself who practise complementary nutritional medicine I think I would have had a different hearing altogether. And for me to establish that argument, I would have to be allowed to give examples from the committee's findings which would indicate clearly the extent to which their ---
His Honour You can go to examples from the committee's findings by all means, that is not a problem. But let us be clear on a few things. The Professional Service Review Committee was certainly not bound by the rules of evidence like a court. Administrative decision makers very rarely, if ever, are. It is the function of the Professional Services Review Committee to look at all the evidence and to decide what it accepts and what it rejects. Its function is to accept some evidence and reject other evidence in the event of a conflict. And I can't say because it happens to reject the evidence that is favourable to you and accept evidence that is unfavourable to you that it is biased. It is doing its job from the view of an impartial outsider which is my point of view. It is doing its job in which it selects which evidence it chooses. It may be forced to discredit some evidence in making its findings but that is its job.
So far as I have seen from looking at the material, samples of its findings, they seem to be more about what you didn't do as a GP which they said you ought to have done than about what you did as a practitioner in nutritional and complementary medicine.