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Abstract
The New South Wales Medical Board established a Health Programme for the assessment and rehabilitation of doctors whose clinical performance was impaired by alcohol or psychoactive substance use, mental or physical illness. This programme was developed to be individualized to the needs of each registrant.
The present study has three aims:
1. To describe those doctors who participated in the Board s Health Programme.
2. To chart the duration of involvement of these doctors through the programme.
3. To examine the outcomes associated with this programme.
The study is based on the prospective cohort of all 181 impaired doctors who participated in the Health Programme between July 1st 1993 and April 30th 2001. Information on each registrant was collected at the time of the initial assessment and at each review conducted as part of the programme. Additional qualitative data was also collected and supplemented by a file audit conducted in August and September 2001.
One hundred and eighty-one doctors were prospectively monitored as part of this study. The largest source of impairment was psychiatric illness (45.3%), 77% of the doctors were male. The average age of the cohort was 41.6 (sd 11.1) years. Impaired doctors were more likely to be working in emergency medicine or psychiatry and be based in a rural area. Of those who had finished their involvement in the programme, successful graduates participated for a mean of 38.2 (sd 22.3) months. In general outcomes of involvement were positive, 64 of 113 (56.6%) of doctors successfully graduated from the programme. One hundred and ten of 168 (65.5%) improved during the period of their involvement and 111 of 126 (88.1%) were working in medicine. Five, 2.8% of the participants died during the period of this study. Measures of registrant insight and support tended to increase during the period of involvement with the Health Programme.
Future studies will need to establish evidence for the most appropriate interventions with impaired doctors. This process would be strengthened by the collection of standardized data across intervention programmes, supplemented with functional assessments and the collection of qualitative data.