ABSTRACT
This chapter examines recent changes to seven regulatory mechanisms and analyses the tensions between competing principles of transparency and confidentiality. The regulation of medical practitioners, and subsequently other health professionals, has its origins in the nineteenth century state-conferred mandate to practise as the medical profession. Health professionals now inhabit a complex work environment where their performance increasingly is scrutinized a different world to the earlier more private world of the doctor-patient relationship. In Australia, 10 national boards and an administrative oversight body, the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency, were set up in 2010 under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act 2008 and the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law 2009, after the enactment of national and parallel State legislation. Policy makers in Australia do not yet unequivocally require open disclosure despite their endorsement of a national open disclosure standard; providers are cautious about possible legal repercussions; while the professions acknowledge an ethical obligation.
