Notifications to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency: Identifying ‘hot spots' of risk

• Project Leader
  Dr Marie Bismark

  mbismark@unimelb.edu.au
  +61 3 8344 0657

Project Details

Our key aims are to:

1. Develop a National Notifications Minimum Dataset ('NNMD') based on notifications regarding conduct, performance and health concerns about health practitioners in Australia
2. Describe the epidemiology of notifications about health practitioners and identify risk factors for becoming a 'notification-prone practitioner'
3. Develop a 'risk-calculator' - a tool that will support regulators in taking a more proactive and empirically-based approach to detecting notification-prone practitioners.

Project summary

Health practitioners with performance, health or conduct concerns can present a serious risk to patients. Yet, we lack reliable methods for identifying these practitioners at an early stage. Each year the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency receives thousands of notifications about individual practitioners. We will use this data to identify "hot spots" of risk among different groups of practitioners and help target interventions to support practitioners and protect patients from harm.

Researchers

Dr Marie Bismark

Professor David Studdert

Dr Matthew Spittal

Funding

NHMRC Partnership Grant