Queensland's Health Ombudsman has revealed a Redlands doctor breached his conditions of registration almost 200 times before he was suspended.
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The local doctor's suspension was used as a case study during a review into improving monitoring of conditions placed on health practitioners.
Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal suspended the doctor from practising for two years after the Queensland Board of the Medical Board of Australia alleged he tried to forge letters to derail a sexual harassment investigation.
Complaints of sexual impropriety during a September, 2011 consultation resulted in the board imposing conditions on the doctor, including having a chaperone present while treating any female patient.
But in reviewing the case, Health Ombudsman Leon Atkinson-MacEwen found the doctor had breached those conditions at least 191 times between the time the board imposed the restrictions and QCAT investigated the complaint.
Mr Atkinson-MacEwen said the medical board could have taken action eight months earlier had the Australian Health Practitioner Agency immediately analysed the information available.
He also found the medical board did not place any sanctions on the doctor for breaching the conditions.
"Despite evidence of the practitioner's non-compliance with the conditions imposed on his registration on at least 191 occasions across a two-year period, it required evidence of forgery for the practitioner's registration to be suspended," Mr Atkinson-McEwen wrote in his review.
"I have formed the view that the processes followed by AHPRA and the QBMBA during their monitoring of the practitioner's compliance with the conditions imposed on his practice, including their decisions, do not meet reasonable expectations for high quality and timely compliance monitoring."
Mr Atkinson-MacEwen's recommendations included ensuring the practitioner agency reviewed self-reported data more frequently in order to detect non-compliance earlier, and for both the agency and medical board to clearly outline their reasons for not taking further action against breaches of conditions placed on medical practitioners.
He said his office would release a review in six months to evaluate how well the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency implemented his recommendations.
"AHPRA have been very receptive to my recommendations and I look forward to continued collaboration between my office and AHPRA to strengthen the health service complaints management system in Queensland even further."
The doctor at the centre of the review will end his suspension period in April next year.
