Medical Negligence Australia

20/10/2026

An eight-year-old girl was struggling to breathe inside a hospital. Her mother was raising the alarm. Tests were showing something seriously wrong with her heart. Now a coroner has found that Amrita Lanka’s death was preventable.

Amrita arrived at Monash Medical Centre on 29 April 2022 after two days of vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pain. Doctors initially suspected gastroenteritis. Overnight, her mother raised concerns about chest pain, breathing difficulties and the unusually high heart rate displayed on the monitor. An abnormal heart tracing led the overnight doctor to suspect myocarditis. But the severity of her condition was not recognised.

There was an opportunity to recognise the danger and urgently escalate her care. The coroner found that earlier escalation and transfer to the Royal Children’s Hospital for specialised life support could have saved her. Instead, her condition deteriorated and she suffered cardiac arrests. Her family never got to take her home.

There is also a question the published findings leave unanswered: what triggered her myocarditis? The findings do not establish a specific trigger. They also do not discuss her vaccination history or whether it was assessed. We cannot fill that gap with an assumption, but we can ask for an answer.

Monash Health says it has strengthened monitoring, escalation and communication since Amrita’s death. For her parents, those changes come with the knowledge that their daughter’s death could have been prevented.

Families should be able to trust that serious warning signs will bring an urgent response. They should be able to raise concerns and know someone is listening.

Amrita was eight. She deserved the chance to grow up.

07/10/2026

A patient is operated on in the wrong place. Another has an object left inside them after surgery. Someone is given the wrong medication. A patient’s condition deteriorates and the warning signs are missed.

These are the kinds of failures hidden behind the phrase “patient safety event”.

Victorian hospitals reported 217 of the most serious incidents in 2024–25. Safer Care Victoria says 61% resulted in the patient’s death. Roughly 130 people. Roughly 130 families whose lives were divided into before and after.

And these weren’t only adult patients. The report includes 27 serious incidents involving maternity and newborn care, and nine involving children’s care. It describes warning signs during pregnancy and labour that were not acted on quickly enough, babies or mothers whose deterioration was recognised too late, and children whose worsening condition or parents’ concerns did not prompt an urgent response.

Imagine walking into a hospital to give birth, or carrying your sick child through its doors, and later learning that the signs someone needed help were there.

And here comes another number that is hard to accept. Hospitals are required to notify Safer Care Victoria within three business days of becoming aware of one of these incidents. Only 26% did. The average time was 22 business days. Were they trying to hide something? How many were never reported?

The reviews produced 915 recommendations. Nine hundred and fifteen things to fix after patients had already been harmed or killed.

When a family walks into a hospital, they are trusting the people and systems inside it with someone they love. If that trust is broken, they deserve the truth, quickly and in full. They deserve to know which changes were actually made. And every other family deserves to know whether those changes will be enough.

29/09/2026

Joe Massa was two years old when his parents took him to Northern Beaches Hospital. He was seriously dehydrated, his heart was racing, and his mother kept asking staff to help him. An internal review later found he was placed in a less urgent triage category than his condition required. He waited two and a half hours for a bed.

Now the coronial inquest is hearing what happened as Joe deteriorated.

One nurse acknowledged recording a heart rate of 182 beats per minute and told his parents she felt she had played a role., but she is human and humans make mistakes. Another recorded 197 and conceded she should have made more observations. Both apologised.

A senior nurse described finding Joe gravely unwell, searching for working monitoring equipment, then calling resuscitation staff herself and pushing his bed there without a doctor accompanying them, as doctors wanted to wait for ultrasound results.

Joe suffered a cardiac arrest. He died two days later from the brain injury that followed.

His parents, Elouise and Danny, did what parents are constantly told to do. They noticed their child was getting worse, spoke up and asked for help. It should not have taken their son’s death for those warnings to be taken seriously.

The question at the centre of this inquest remains unbearable. How did so many warning signs pass before a two-year-old child lost his life.

The inquest is ongoing. Joe’s family deserves the full truth, and every family deserves a hospital that acts when a child is deteriorating.

21/09/2026

People have lost loved ones. Others have been left permanently disabled or facing lifelong consequences after healthcare harm-then forced to fight for years for answers, accountability and essential support.

Changing administrative processes and reducing wait times is not enough if serious patient harm, repeated complaints and evidence of systemic failure still do not lead to effective action.

Maddison Teigan has launched a national petition calling for two connected reforms:

1. An independent Royal Commission into AHPRA and the National Boards-to investigate regulatory failures, serious and repeated patient harm, evidence handling, accountability, governance and whether the existing system must be replaced with one that genuinely protects the public.

2. A national no-fault patient-support system-so people harmed through healthcare can access treatment, rehabilitation and practical support without first having to win a years-long legal battle over fault.

Patients deserve protection. Those already harmed deserve support. Practitioners who speak up should also be protected—not placed at risk for raising safety concerns.

Two reforms. One safer health system.

Please sign the petition, share it with others and tag your local MP.

https://c.org/NCJCXPVTNk

20/09/2026

Medical professionals save lives every day. That truth should never be used as a shield to silence the people they have harmed.

When another industry injures a customer, we demand an investigation, accountability, compensation and change. When the medical system injures a patient, the patient is too often told it was an “unfortunate outcome,” an “acceptable risk” or simply a coincidence.

The institution protects its reputation, the insurer protects its money, the lawyers protect the institution and the injured person is left fighting just to have the truth acknowledged.

Blind trust is not informed consent. A white coat does not make someone infallible, and the word “healthcare” should never place an industry beyond scrutiny.

Future Solutions Foundation exists because behind every medical-negligence statistic is a real person whose health, income, home and future may have been destroyed.

These Australians do not need another system explaining why nobody is responsible. They need practical support, genuine accountability and people willing to stand beside them.

This is not hatred of medicine. It is a refusal to accept a system that protects authority more fiercely than it protects patients.

Trust should never be demanded. It should be earned.

07/09/2026

Australia’s healthcare watchdog is facing serious questions over the way it investigates complaints from patients who say they have been harmed by registered health practitioners.

The issue has now reached the front page of The Sun-Herald, which reports that injured, chronically ill and traumatised patients have accused the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) of failing to adequately investigate allegations of negligence and misconduct.

But buried beneath the headline is a statistic that deserves far more attention.

According to findings highlighted from the Dawson review, 85 to 90 per cent of all notifications to AHPRA were closed with “no further action.” The review also found 25 per cent of active investigations and 21 per cent of active tribunal referrals had remained unresolved for more than 24 months, with some cases open for more than three years.

One of the patients featured is advocate Maddison Teigan, who says a routine blood draw in February 2021 resulted in median nerve damage and complex regional pain syndrome. She alleges the nurse repeatedly attempted the blood draw, that she withdrew her consent and asked for a break, and that the needle was moved inside her arm. She described feeling an electric-shock-like sensation.

What followed is almost as disturbing as the alleged injury.

Maddison says the clinic initially failed to provide the nurse’s provider number and AHPRA declined to investigate. She returned in 2025 with the nurse’s details and supporting evidence, including correspondence from a senior neurologist referring to a history of median nerve injury following venipuncture and persistent arm pain.

AHPRA opened an investigation. The Nursing and Midwifery Board subsequently closed the case, finding there was “no reason to take any regulatory action.”

Documents obtained under freedom-of-information laws reportedly revealed something even more troubling: Maddison’s complaint had been internally coded as “misconceived, lacking in substance,” and some of the material she supplied was reportedly not submitted to the board making the decision.

This is precisely why transparency matters.

A regulator does not have to agree with every complainant. Not every adverse outcome is negligence, and not every complaint warrants disciplinary action. But patients deserve to know that their evidence was actually considered, that decisions were reached through a transparent process, and why serious allegations resulted in action — or no action.

Maddison has also raised another uncomfortable question: AHPRA is primarily funded through registration and application fees paid by the practitioners it regulates. That does not itself prove a conflict has affected individual decisions, but patients are entitled to ask whether the structure provides sufficient independence and public confidence.

Australia’s health ministers have already ordered improvements to the timeliness, quality, accountability and transparency of the regulatory system following the Dawson review.

That tells us this debate is no longer simply disgruntled patients versus the regulator. The system itself has been reviewed, significant deficiencies have been identified, and governments have demanded change.

At Medical Negligence Australia, we hear repeatedly from people who say the injury was only the beginning. What broke them was spending months or years trying to be heard afterwards.

A healthcare complaints system cannot protect the public if the people it exists to protect lose faith that their complaints will ever be properly heard.

Patients deserve answers.
Patients deserve transparency.
And when the system fails, patients deserve accountability.

04/09/2026

Imagine going to a doctor because you are in pain. You are vulnerable, frightened and looking for answers. You trust the person standing in front of you because they are the specialist. You trust the hospital. You trust the regulators. You trust that nobody is going to remove a healthy organ from your body unless it is absolutely necessary.

Now imagine discovering that trust may have cost you your fertility.

Former Melbourne gynaecologist Dr Simon Gordon has now been referred by the Medical Board of Australia to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), where he faces allegations of professional misconduct relating to his treatment of women with endometriosis and pelvic pain.

It is important to state clearly: these are allegations. VCAT has not yet determined that Gordon committed professional misconduct, and Gordon has denied wrongdoing.

But what patients are alleging deserves to be heard.

An ABC Four Corners investigation reported accounts from women who underwent repeated surgery after being told they had severe endometriosis, while pathology in some cases reportedly showed little or no endometriosis. Procedures allegedly performed on patients included removal of ovaries, fallopian tubes and uteruses.

One patient’s story is particularly difficult to comprehend.

Courtney Paton underwent seven operations.

According to ABC, her family paid more than $32,000 for surgeries performed by Gordon. By the age of just 25, both of her ovaries and her uterus had been removed.

She can never naturally conceive a child.

ABC reported that pathology from her operations repeatedly failed to demonstrate the severe endometriosis she believed she was being treated for, apart from one tiny finding that another specialist reportedly considered potentially clinically insignificant.

But this investigation raises another question that may be even more important than what happened inside the operating theatre:

Where were the safeguards?

ABC reports concerns about Gordon’s practices were raised with Epworth management, AHPRA and Victoria’s health complaints system over several years.

In Courtney’s case, concerns were reportedly raised with Epworth management in June 2022, after her second o***y had already been removed.

Then in September 2024, a professor of gynaecology and two other doctors reportedly complained to AHPRA, raising concerns that young women had undergone removal of ovaries despite pathology not confirming the severe disease they had reportedly been told they had.

And now look at the scale.

Law firm Arnold Thomas & Becker says more than 500 former patients have contacted the firm. It currently represents 295 women.

Clients allege injuries including loss of fertility, premature surgical menopause, chronic pelvic pain and lasting physical and psychological harm. Multiple civil proceedings have commenced in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

The Victorian Government has now committed $2 million to support affected women and girls, while Epworth has commissioned an independent external review examining its clinical-governance systems, including credentialling, oversight of clinical practice and the handling of concerns raised by patients and staff.

Think about what that means.

This story is no longer simply about whether one surgeon made the right clinical decisions.

It raises questions about hospitals, complaints processes, regulators and the systems supposedly designed to identify dangerous patterns before hundreds of patients are potentially affected.

A woman cannot grow another uterus.

She cannot simply replace her ovaries.

You cannot hand someone their fertility back after it has been surgically taken away.

And if the allegations before the tribunal are ultimately established, saying “the system has learned from this” will be very little consolation to women who may live with those consequences for the rest of their lives.

That is why medical negligence matters.

Patients should not have to become investigators themselves before someone listens to them. Complaints should not need to reach the hundreds before patterns are taken seriously. And when doctors themselves raise concerns, Australians deserve to know what happened next, who investigated them, and whether patients were adequately protected while that process unfolded.

The Medical Board’s referral to VCAT is an important step.

But for the women involved, the bigger question remains:

How did it ever get this far?

03/09/2026

28/08/2026

THIS ISN’T JUST AN AMERICAN STORY.

Depo-Provera is still registered for use in Australia.

And documents released by Australia’s own drug regulator reveal something Australian women deserve to know.

In February 2024, Pfizer Australia formally asked the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) to add a meningioma warning to the professional Product Information for Depo-Provera.

The proposed warning stated that meningiomas had been reported following long-term use of progestins, including medroxyprogesterone acetate — the active drug in Depo-Provera.

On 26 February 2024, the TGA approved the meningioma warning.

But then came an extraordinary question.

In December 2024, the TGA was asked:

“The meningioma risk is in the Product Information but not in the Consumer Medicine Information – why not?”

The TGA responded that ensuring the Consumer Medicine Information was consistent with the professional Product Information was the sponsor’s responsibility.

The sponsor?

Pfizer Australia.

Meanwhile, the international evidence continued to grow.

A major 2024 study published in the BMJ found prolonged use of injectable medroxyprogesterone acetate was associated with approximately 5.6 times the odds of intracranial meningioma requiring surgery.

Thousands of women have since brought claims in the United States alleging they developed meningiomas after using Depo-Provera. Pfizer disputes liability, but in 2026 a settlement program was established covering a majority of claims in the massive federal litigation.

And here in Australia, Depo-Provera remains registered.

This is why informed consent matters.

It isn’t enough for warnings to exist somewhere deep inside regulatory documents intended for health professionals.

Women deserve to know the risks of a medication they are being asked to put into their bodies.

Future Solutions Foundation believes patients deserve transparency, accountability and access to information that allows them to make genuinely informed decisions about their health.

Because informed consent without adequate information isn’t informed consent.