Monitoring a 'Menace': Peer Review and the Regulation of Substance-Addicted Doctors, 1933-48
Journal of Law and Medicine (Forthcoming)
24 Pages Posted: 12 Dec 2016
Date Written: December 8, 2016
Abstract
This article examines the first power that Victorian parliamentarians granted to the Medical Board of Victoria (Board) to regulate impaired doctors. Convinced that substance-addicted doctors were a ‘menace’, in 1933 the legislature gave the Board discretion to remove their names from its register of ‘legally qualified medical practitioners’. In the next 15 years, however, the Board did not cancel the registration of any of the doctors who came to its attention for their addiction to alcohol or drugs. Rather, the Board monitored the doctors; it mostly sought assurances from them that they were obtaining treatment for their addiction, abstaining from consuming alcohol and drugs, and refraining from practising medicine, generally until their treating practitioners considered that they were fit to resume medical practice. This article evaluates the benefits and pitfalls of the Board’s regulation of these doctors, including in light of Anglo-American legal scholars’ discussion at that time about the merits of the growth of administrative agencies and their work. The article then considers the lessons that we can learn from this history about how substance-dependent doctors should be regulated and who should be involved in decision making about their regulation.
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