Dr Michelle Kenney wins in tribunal after being suspended by the Medical Board of Australia

A Hampton Park doctor whose clinic was banned from conducting surgery over a “serious” risk to patient health and safety will be allowed to work as a doctor, under one condition.

Harjit Kaur, pictured with her husband Sukhjinder Singh, died suddenly after surgery on January 12.

A Melbourne doctor whose clinic was banned from conducting surgery over a “serious” risk to patient health and safety has won the right to return to medicine.

Dr Michelle Kenney will be allowed to work as a doctor – on the condition she holds no clinical governance role – until her case can be heard in full at a later hearing, a Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has ruled.

Dr Kenney was suspended by the Medical Board of Australia in May after her clinic, Hampton Park Women’s Health Clinic, was stripped of surgical accreditation following fast-tracked inspections.

But a tribunal ruled this decision, plus extra rules on Dr Kenney, meant she was not a risk to the public, and put the board’s suspension on hold in a decision late last week.

Hampton Park Women’s Health Clinic Director Dr Michelle Kenney.

Dr Kenney’s clinic had come to the health department’s attention after the death of patient Harjit Kaur post surgery on January 12, prompting inspections that identified separate, unrelated issues and led to the loss of accreditation.

Dr Kenney did not care for Ms Kaur. Her cause of death is still unknown and VCAT heard an autopsy found no evidence of “complications after surgery and ruled out adverse effects of anaesthesia, infection and other conditions or reactions”.

The board had argued Dr Kenney should be suspended because the standards the clinic failed to meet in inspections reflected on her as a doctor.

But Tribunal member Elisabeth Wentworth disagreed and said any risks were addressed by the clinic’s surgery ban, and the board failed to show how Dr Kenney was a risk to general practice patients so as to warrant an immediate ban.

The clinic came to the health department’s attention after Harjit Kaur’s death. Picture: GoFundMe

“There is no evidence that as a general practitioner she has ever harmed a patient or practices in that setting in a way that is unsafe,” she said.

A full hearing will be held later this year.

Ms Wentworth said allowing the ban to continue until then would be “potentially disastrous” for Dr Kenney and the future of the clinic, which provides an important medical service – terminations – to the community.

The VCAT documents also revealed the previously unpublished patient safety reasons cited by the department when they shut down Hampton Park’s surgical operations.

These included a failure to check medical staff’s credentials, to train current nursing staff so they were equipped to provide necessary health services; to ensure pre-admission screening and post-procedure observation by nursing staff and “serious failures in the relation to the hygiene and sterilization of equipment used in surgery”.

Originally published as Dr Michelle Kenney wins in tribunal after being suspended by the Medical Board of Australia