In an address to the surgeons’ college, AHPRA CEO Justin Untersteiner hinted at what the future of regulation will look like.
The health practitioner regulator will continue to focus on intervening early on emerging risks, with CEO Justin Untersteiner telling a Royal Australasian College of Surgeons summit that “the absence of complaints does not necessarily mean the absence of risk”.
Over the past year, some of the new guidance documents issued by AHPRA have come with a “word of caution” warning that the regulator and the national boards could potentially act even in the absence of a patient notification.
“Ahpra and the Medical and Nursing and Midwifery Boards are working with other regulators to understand prescribing patterns,” one ‘word of caution’ reads.
“We may investigate the practice of practitioners with high rates of prescribing any scheduled medicine, including medicinal cannabis, even if we have not received a complaint.”
It appears that AHPRA is still actively looking for ways to modernise.
“This is not about creating unnecessary regulatory burden or overstepping our remit,” Mr Untersteiner said.
“It’s about ensuring regulation remains fit for purpose in a health system that looks very different to the one many of our existing frameworks were designed for.”
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Speaking at the RACS Surgical Leaders Forum meeting, Mr Untersteiner said AHPRA continued to review how it improved the “fundamentals of regulation”.
“Improving regulatory performance requires a willingness to examine our own systems critically,” he said.
“That’s why we’ve been conducting a range of internal reviews across notifications, compliance, and governance, applying the lessons we’ve learned and building on the significant work already underway through the Kruk and Dawson review recommendations.
“As we continue to review and improve our processes, we’re looking at how we can make better use of our wider regulatory toolkit alongside our notifications processes to address risk earlier and more effectively.”
He also specifically called out conflicts of interest as a specific area that the regulator was looking at.
“Recent high-profile matters – where conflicts were not appropriately identified or managed – have shown how weaknesses in clinical governance and issues with organisational culture can allow conflicts to influence decision-making and ultimately lead to poor outcomes for patients,” he said.
“That’s why Ahpra and the National Boards recently released interim guidance reminding practitioners of their obligations to identify, disclose and appropriately manage conflicts of interest.
“At its heart, the message here is straightforward: patients must be able to trust that clinical decisions are being made because they are the right decisions, not because they are the most commercially attractive.”
To this end, he said, the codes of conduct that underpin the new guidance are currently under review.
He also said AHPRA continued to work closely with other regulators and statutory agencies to share intelligence.
