AHPRA's performance does not warrant fee increases
AMA Vice President, Professor Geoffrey Dobb, said today that the Medical Board of Australia should not have increased doctor registration fees following the poor treatment received by thousands of doctors during the first year of operation of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA).
AHPRA is the overarching body for the 10 national health practitioner registration boards, including the Medical Board.
The Medical Board has increased registration fees for 2011/12 to $670, an increase of $20.
This comes on top of registration fees for doctors increasing in AHPRA’s first year by nearly 85 per cent over the national average fees that applied prior to the introduction of the new system.
Prof Dobb said that, given all of the problems that doctors faced with getting registered in the first year of the scheme, the Board should at the very least have held the fees at current levels.
“The introduction of the new national registration arrangements has been a debacle,” Prof Dobb said.
“Given AHPRA’s performance, fees should have gone down, not up.
“Thousands of doctors were disadvantaged by bureaucratic bungling.
“Some doctors had to stop working while their registration was reinstated, and patients were unable to claim Medicare rebates because their doctors were suddenly unregistered due to administrative errors.
“AHPRA should not be charging higher fees to the health professions to cover the costs of mismanagement.
“It would be more appropriate for AHPRA to adopt better business practices and create efficiencies in its administrative operations,” Prof Dobb said.
6 July 2011
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