South
Australia Revises Its Unregistered Health Care Practitioners Code of Conduct
Proposal
HypnosisAustralia,
May 2009
By
Dr Tracie O'Keefe DCH, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Psychotherapist
& Counsellor
Editorial Director of HypnosisAustralia Online.
For a long
time South Australia has been in a quandary about how to protect the public
from unscrupulous and incompetent non-government-registered healthcare
practitioners. The Health & Community Services Complaints Commission
(HCSCC), as a statutory independent government body, oversees complaints
against offending practitioners. It tries to resolve complaints about
healthcare practitioners and investigates serious complaints. The Health
and Community Services Complaints Act 2004 requires unregistered practitioners
providing health and community services to meet a range of legal obligations
when providing these services. These include:
to ensure
the rights of service users consistent with the Charter of Health and
Community Services principles.
to protect services that meets the generally accepted standards applicable.
to attempt to resolve complaints promptly and appropriately.
to respond to HCSCC requests for information about the complaint.
There has been an egregious history in SA over the past few years over
hypnotherapists being able to practise in their own right and the SA Psychological
Board has made attempts to restrict the practice of hypnosis to only government-registered
practitioners. What also has happened in SA is that the debacle between
the differentiation between government-registered healthcare practitioners
and non-government-registered practitioners can at times make non-government-registered
practitioners look shonky and non-legitimate, when they may in fact be
practising within the law and ethically. Also, political campaigners,
often for their own ends, frequently seek to overstate the number of complaints
against non-government-registered healthcare practitioners by never mentioning
the large number of complaints heard against government-registered healthcare
practitioners, thereby creating an illusion of a problem of general malpractice
among the former.
It is true that there are unscrupulous and incompetent non-government-registered
healthcare practitioners operating in SA and some of those are indeed
calling themselves hypnotherapists and the public does need protecting.
The SA Parliament Social Development Committee started an enquiry into
bogus, deregistered and unregistered practitioners in February 2008 and
the HCSCC has received several what it calls serious complaints against
such practitioners. This has lead to the HCSCC making a recommendation
to the Parliamentary Inquiry in March and November, 2008 for SA to adopt
the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (NSW HCCC) model for dealing
with such matters. The inquiry report is to be tabled before SA Parliament
in June 2009. This may mean SA non-government-registered healthcare practitioners,
including hypnotherapists, will have to adopt a publicly published code
of conduct, adhere to that code of conduct and be liable for prosecution
if the practitioner contravenes the code of conduct and has had a complaint
registered against them.
This code of conduct for non-government-registered healthcare practitioners
in NSW has been in practice for over a year now. It does not require anyone
to have any qualifications or be registered with a professional association.
There are, however, major problems with the approach because out of around
50 practitioners surveyed by the journal in NSW only approximately 5%
had ever heard of the code of conduct and less than 2% knew the contents
of it. There is little doubt that when the NSW HCCC brought in the code
of conduct it chose the cheapest option to try to regulate non-government-registered
healthcare practitioners and ultimately if you cut corners you will get
something shoddy and broken, even before you begin.
©HypnosisAustralia,
May 2009
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