Former Bundaberg hospital surgeon Jayant Patel has been banned from practising in Australia ever again. PIC: Getty Source: AFP
FORMER Bundaberg Hospital surgeon Dr Jayant Patel will never again practice medicine in Australia, after a tribunal order today.
Judge Alexander Horneman-Wren said if Patel had been currently registered, Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal would have cancelled his registration.
Judge Horneman-Wren ordered that Patel must never again be registered as a registered health practitioner in the medical health profession in Australia.
“One could have little, if any, confidence that he would ever in the future possess the qualities of integrity, honesty and trustworthiness so essential for the future practice of medicine,” the judge said.
The Medical Board of Australia brought disciplinary proceedings against Patel on nine grounds, including providing false and misleading information when applying for registration in Queensland in 2003.
Patel failed to disclose he had been struck off the register in New York State only 17 months earlier and had conditions on his medical registration in Oregon 29 months earlier.
He also performed procedures on five Queensland patients, knowing he had been restricted from doing them in Oregon.
The tribunal found all grounds were established.
“The five grounds relating to his incompetent practice are the manifest and tragic result of his obtaining unlimited registration by his deliberate fraud,” Judge Horneman-Wren said.
He said Patel had “demonstrated a clear unsuitability to hold registration as a medical practitioner”.
Patel failed to disclose he had been found guilty of practising medicine fraudulently in New York more than 20 years before his Queensland application.
“He does not appear to have been deterred by his earlier disciplinary experiences,” Judge Horneman-Wren said.
“His having engaged in fraudulent activity associated with the practice of his profession on occasions more than 20 years apart is particularly troubling.
“As is his apparently cavalier preparedness to disregard, or to be indifferent to, the potential serious consequences of his fraud on others.”
By failing to disclose that his surgical practice had been severely restricted in Oregon, he was unable to observe those conditions in Australia, because it “would have exposed his deceit”.
“What then followed was incompetent clinical decision-making, the performance of procedures that were beyond his scope of competent practice and his failure to consult”, the judge said.
If he had sought opinions of other surgeons some of his procedures on patients would not have been performed.
“Others would not have been performed in the manner, at the location, and with the tragic outcomes that they were,” Judge Horneman-Wren said.
Today’s decision is likely to affect Patel’s future registration in the United States, where he lives but has been unable to practice while the Australian disciplinary proceedings were pending.
Patel did not return from the United States for the hearing and did not take any part in the proceedings against him.
Patel was convicted and jailed in 2010 on three counts of manslaughter and the grievous bodily harm of a fourth patient.
Two appeals were rejected but in 2012 the High Court struck down the convictions.
Patel was acquitted of a manslaughter charge and a jury failed to reach a verdict on a grievous bodily harm charge.
All other charges were dropped in return for him pleading guilty in 2013 to four counts of fraud, by dishonestly obtaining employment registration.
He was given a two-year suspended sentence.