The Round Up: A Rural Health Podcast
Aug 20, 2026 · 34 min · 10 segments
**🎙️ RDAQ Conference Bonus Episode** Being reported can be one of the most confronting experiences in a doctor's career. Recorded following Dr Catriona Arnold-Nott’s incredibly popular presentation…
Catriona Arnold-NottGuestAlyssa HafferlyHostAnd I suppose just to summarise what we've talked about so far is the importance of recognising that you're not alone in a reporting circumstance like this.
There are others who've come before, but it's a terrifying thing to experience as as a practitioner, the first step that you took was to phone your medical defence organisation and talk through it with them, but something that was delayed was seeing your own GP.
And mandatory reporting is something I think is a little bit terrifying, but I suppose the take-home message today is not to be afraid of mandatory reporting, that it's going to be used judiciously and in the best interest of the practitioner.
And system change has happened over the last 20 years or so and partly on the back of your experience, which is a wonderful thing to be able to take away with you.
And we'll add the link to that video on the APRA site to our podcast notes for our listeners.
Katrina, looking back over the last almost 10 years, as you said, since that report was made to APRA, I'm sure there are lots of things that you would have done differently.
But what advice do you give to practitioners who are facing a similar kind of investigation against themselves?
Well, exactly as you just said, Alyssa, I would say, you know, yes, absolutely call your medical defence organisation.
I would, you know, as soon as it happens, I would, I wish if I could go back that I would have run my GP surgery straight away and said, I'm going to need some help here.
Because when I eventually went and saw my GP and we talked about it, it was such an enormous relief to be talking to another health professional about this and to know how well he understood the distress.
Even if you think, oh, look, this doesn't really feel like a big deal and I'm not really going to get that hung up on it.
I think getting some professional help early and having a good counsellor to talk this stuff through with as you go through the journey, because even if it doesn't fit, to be quite honest, to me, it didn't feel like a big deal at the beginning.
And, once again, APRA have, and partly thanks to the feedback they're getting from doctors like me, have made some significant changes to their processing, to how they communicate with practitioners under investigation.
And, of course, from my point of view, those months of silence felt like, oh, my God, this is really terrible.
You know, like they're just finding a gazillion things – Whereas what happened was it was sitting on a shelf because it wasn't considered a significant breach.
And so it sat on a shelf while they were dealing with all the more significant things that had come up in the meantime without communicating that to me.
And I suppose just to summarise what we've talked about so far is the importance of recognising that you're not alone in a reporting circumstance like this.
There are others who've come before, but it's a terrifying thing to experience as as a practitioner, the first step that you took was to phone your medical defence organisation and talk through it with them, but something that was delayed was seeing your own GP.
And mandatory reporting is something I think is a little bit terrifying, but I suppose the take-home message today is not to be afraid of mandatory reporting, that it's going to be used judiciously and in the best interest of the practitioner.
And system change has happened over the last 20 years or so and partly on the back of your experience, which is a wonderful thing to be able to take away with you.
And we'll add the link to that video on the APRA site to our podcast notes for our listeners.
Katrina, looking back over the last almost 10 years, as you said, since that report was made to APRA, I'm sure there are lots of things that you would have done differently.
But what advice do you give to practitioners who are facing a similar kind of investigation against themselves?
Well, exactly as you just said, Alyssa, I would say, you know, yes, absolutely call your medical defence organisation.
I would, you know, as soon as it happens, I would, I wish if I could go back that I would have run my GP surgery straight away and said, I'm going to need some help here.
Because when I eventually went and saw my GP and we talked about it, it was such an enormous relief to be talking to another health professional about this and to know how well he understood the distress.
Even if you think, oh, look, this doesn't really feel like a big deal and I'm not really going to get that hung up on it.
I think getting some professional help early and having a good counsellor to talk this stuff through with as you go through the journey, because even if it doesn't fit, to be quite honest, to me, it didn't feel like a big deal at the beginning.
And, once again, APRA have, and partly thanks to the feedback they're getting from doctors like me, have made some significant changes to their processing, to how they communicate with practitioners under investigation.
And, of course, from my point of view, those months of silence felt like, oh, my God, this is really terrible.
You know, like they're just finding a gazillion things – Whereas what happened was it was sitting on a shelf because it wasn't considered a significant breach.
And so it sat on a shelf while they were dealing with all the more significant things that had come up in the meantime without communicating that to me.
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