Sexual Abuse and Bill 87.

"Ontario has introduced legislation that would, if passed, further protect patients in Ontario and keep them healthy, including strengthening and reinforcing Ontario's zero tolerance policy on sexual abuse of patients by any regulated health professional. 
The Protecting Patients Act, 2016 includes legislative amendments that would, if passed:

• Expand the list of acts of sexual abuse that will result in the mandatory revocation of a regulated health professional's license
• Remove the ability of a regulated health professional to continue to practice on patients of a specific gender after an allegation or finding of sexual abuse
• Increase access to patient therapy and counseling as soon as a complaint of sexual abuse by a regulated health professional is filed
• Ensure that all relevant information about regulated health professionals' current and past conduct is available to the public in an easy-to-access and transparent way." 
  
     Sexual abuse, within or outside medical practice is outside the pale and never to be tolerated.  Within the profession the safeguards against it and the measures that have been set up to detect and deal with it have been rigorously enforced and due process has been followed.  The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons has been charged with the responsibility of monitoring medical malpractice of any kind and of investigating and dealing with any breaches of proper professional behaviour.   For the most part the system has worked well, though as with most regulatory bodies there are occasional failures.  There are also false allegations made on occasion that can irrefutably damage a health care professional who is entirely innocent.  Nevertheless, both patients and physicians have had access to due process and been treated fairly and for the most part the punishment has fitted the crime.  That any accused be given a fair hearing and not massacred by the media, has been the bedrock of a  civilized society, but that seems to be under attack in many ways in contemporary society.  The government of Ontario now intends to change this structure in a fashion that would give them complete control of how individual cases would be disposed of  and of defining what comprises an infringement and how it should be dealt with.  It is allocating to itself the defining of the committee structure and penalty for alleged infringement of any rules they legislate.   It is undermining a system implemented by the College of Physicians and Surgeons composed of both physicians and non physicians, that has worked well in Canada in the fifty-five years I have practiced here and plans to replace it with a department of health dictatorship.  Because the risk is so high for any physician frivolously, maliciously or mistakenly accused of such an offense, I would advise no physician to do an intimate examination of a patient without a family member present and if still in practice I would so inform my patients.
     How many pelvic, rectal, prostate or breast exams will remain unperformed if this bill passes is hard to assess.  Ultimately, it is the patient who loses out.
     Meanwhile, the administridiots continue to destroy health care in Canada.
  Comment if you have any view on whether Bill 87 will help or harm health care.