Adrian Dix tabled the Health Professions and Occupations Act on Wednesday afternoon, saying it would replace the Health Professions Act. Expected results will include routine inspections of all health colleges, funding for victims of sexual abuse and publication of all disciplinary measures, according to the province. “Our government is making the most significant changes to the oversight of regulated health professions in British Columbia’s history,” Dix said in a press release. “These changes will streamline the process of regulating new health professions, provide stronger oversight, provide more consistent discipline across all professions, act in the public interest and protect patient care in the province, while laying the foundations to further reduce the total number of regulatory colleges’. The new legislation follows 2019 report by an international expert who charged that BC’s health professional colleges had demonstrated a “lack of relentless focus on patient safety” and recommended that the current system be scrapped and replaced entirely. The proposed new act would create a new supervisory body and an independent disciplinary tribunal for professionals accused of wrongdoing. The province says it will also streamline the process of reducing the number of vocational schools to six, from the original 24. Some mergers in recent years have reduced the current number to 15. Dix said the province will now prioritize the regulation of counselors and psychotherapists, something many members of those professions have been calling for over the past three decades. After that, the priority will be professional diagnosticians and therapists.
New anti-discrimination measures, funding for victims
According to a backgrounder from the province, a new watchdog will conduct routine audits of colleges and have the power to investigate them if necessary. This body will also set standards for policies and practices. The legislation will also create a separate disciplinary process for practitioners, to which the watchdog will provide support. Unlike now, all disciplinary contracts involving health professionals will be made public. Currently, only those considered “serious issues” are published. Colleges will have to fund counseling for victims of sexual abuse and sexual assault, and victims will be able to recover costs from the professionals who harmed them. College board members will no longer be elected but appointed through what the ministry describes as a “competence-based process” to ensure they prioritize public safety over the interests of the professionals who voted them in. Dix said the legislation also addresses the findings of the “In Plain Sight” report on anti-Indigenous racism within BC’s health care system. Discrimination will be considered a form of professional misconduct and all colleges will be required to implement anti-discrimination measures.
Lack of “clear accountability to the public” in the system
The health department’s press release on the act says it was written “partly in response” to a report by British regulatory expert Harry Caton, who was brought in to look into dysfunction at the BC College of Dental Surgeons. When he looked beyond the dental college system-wide, Cayton wrote that he discovered “a lack of relentless focus on patient safety in many but not all of today’s colleges. Their governance is insufficiently independent, without a competency framework. A way of managing the skill mix or clear accountability to the public they serve’. International regulation expert Harry Cayton, right, presented his report on the regulation of health professionals in BC in April 2019. (Mike McArthur/CBC) His concerns were not new. BC’s ombudsman expressed some dismay at the state of regulation 19 years ago, writing “the professions do not seem to have fully accepted or understood what it means to act in the public interest.” Cayton’s report highlighted a number of disturbing examples from recent history, including the case of Anke Zimmermann, the former Victorian naturopath who gained global attention after treating a small boy with a homeopathic medicine derived from the saliva of a rabid dog. Cayton said the story shows “an example of the weakness in public protection of fragmented self-regulation.” It was the BC Naturopathic Association that stepped up and filed a complaint against Zimmermann. Cayton writes that this turn of events made it appear that the college, which is legally mandated to protect the public, was less dedicated to that mission than a professional association, whose mandate is to act on behalf of its members. her. The report also criticized the “secrecy” built into the complaints system in BC “Only a small number of results from complaints are published,” Cayton wrote. “It should be recognized as a fundamental right of a patient to know the abilities and conduct of the health care provider.” Cayton’s report led to the formation of a cross-party committee consisting of Dix and then health critics Norm Letnick of the Liberals and Sonia Furstenau of the Green Party, which developed the framework for the legislation introduced Wednesday.
