Two legal actions involving the PSR dating back to 2017 and 2019, have seen movement in the courts over the last few months.
The cogs of the legal system have creaked onward in two long-running, separate civil cases brought by doctors against the Professional Services Review, with one potentially being heard in the High Court of Australia.
Both cases are relatively well-known; one involves a GP who was requested to produce up to 25 years’ worth of medical records, and the other involves an ophthalmologist who argues that a previous director of the PSR failed to meaningfully review his submission before referring him to a committee.
In the first case, Director, Professional Services Review v Yoong (No 2) [2025] FCAFC 106, the latest update is that the Federal Court of Australia has granted a stay on its previous orders, allowing the GP time to apply for special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia.
Dr Matthew Yoong was initially referred to the PSR by Medicare in April 2019, with the watchdog asked to investigate his provision of services between May 2017 and April 2018.
In May 2019, the PSR provided Dr Yoong with a notice requesting complete clinical records for 76 different patients.
Dr Yoong has submitted to courts that he understood this request to be limited to services rendered or initiated during the review period only and produced 9103 pages of clinical records in accordance.
The PSR then advised Dr Yoong’s solicitors that the scope of the notice required production of the entirety of the clinical records for each patient, not just from within the dates of the review period.
Dr Yoong had been seeing 20 of the 76 patients for more than 25 years, had been seeing a further 13 for between 15 and 25 years.
After back and forth between the PSR and Dr Yoong’s solicitors about the scope of the records request, he was ultimately given a notice in November 2021 under section 106ZPM(2) of the Health Insurance Act “in respect of his intentional refusal or failure to comply” with the request.
Dr Yoong was banned from billing Medicare, effective immediately.
He was granted a stay on this order when he sought judicial review of the PSR director’s decision.
When the case went to court, the judge upheld Dr Yoong’s application for review and made orders that his Medicare disqualification was invalid.
The PSR appealed this finding and won. That was in July 2025.
It then sought to reinstate Dr Yoong’s Medicare disqualification.
It’s in regard to this latest disqualification that Dr Yoong has now been granted another stay, as of 8 August 2025.
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“[The Federal Court’s] reasons included that if a stay had not been granted, Dr Yoong’s application for special leave to appeal could be rendered futile, the stay maintained the status quo since there was a stay in place throughout the appeal proceedings, and it would be difficult to ameliorate the prejudice to Dr Yoong if the stay was not granted,” the latest PSR Director’s update reads.
Should Dr Yoong’s application to appeal at the High Court be refused, the stay will end immediately.
If it approves the application, the stay will last until the High Court passes judgement.
The second case working its way through the courts is that of Queensland ophthalmologist Dr David Kitchen, who is in the process of bringing a tort of misfeasance in public office against a former director of the PSR.
Dr Kitchen was initially referred for PSR review in June 2017, in relation to services performed between February 2016 and January 2017.
He was eventually referred to a committee and was disqualified from billing Medicare.
Evidence would later indicate that there was just a 17-minute window between Dr Kitchen’s 96-page written submission defending his case being emailed to the PSR director and the PSR director deciding to refer him to a committee.
The PSR director at the time, Professor Julie Quinlivan, has refuted this claim; in submissions to courts, she recalls reading a printed copy of the submission over the course of a weekend, prior to receiving an emailed version.
In 2021, the Federal Court of Australia ruled that the decision to refer Dr Kitchen to a committee was invalid, as was his disqualification, due to the possibility that his submission had not been taken into account by the director.
Although this was a win for Dr Kitchen, it only voided the findings of the PSR – not the right of the PSR to have begun an investigation in the first place.
The PSR restarted its review of Dr Kitchen in mid-2021, but the PSR’s current director Dr Antonio Di Dio ultimately decided to take no further action against Dr Kitchen on the grounds that there were circumstances which would make a proper investigation impossible.
In a summary document submitted to the Supreme Court of Queensland in August 2025, Dr Kitchen’s legal team outline their central claim: that Professor Quinlivan, in her capacity as PSR director, “knowingly acted in excess of … her power” when she referred Dr Kitchen to a committee.
He is now seeking damages in relation to loss of income incurred during the committee process, the cost of engaging additional administrative staff, travel expenses, legal costs, exemplary damages and general damages for humiliation, embarrassment and damage to his professional reputation.
Professor Quinlivan’s legal team is of the opinion that the claim should be dismissed, with costs.
