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Dr Edmund Bateman
Dr Bateman is founder and Managing Director of Primary Health Care Limited
This is the entry for Dr Bateman on Primary's 2008 Annual Report, which, as a public company, it has to put out.
 
20 Jan 2011
If you have a problem with a doctor and that doctor works in a hospital, medical centre or clinic etc, is anyone in the management of that organisation likely to provide any help?
In our experience, absolutely not.
We have not found one such person with the slightest interest in how it's working out for the patients of their doctors at the coal face.
They are far more interested in churning out guff on their websites etc about how all their doctors are all absolutely wonderful, the best in the business - better than all the rest.
We could give you dozens of examples of this.
And it applies just as much to management people in the privates sector as in the government sector.
The bad news - in the end it's a matter between you and the doctor, because management people never care.
This is perfectly illustrated in an experience we had with Dr Ed Bateman, the Managing Director of Primary Health Care Limited.
He wrote us this letter on 3 Jun 2008, in response to a letter we had sent him, raising a problem - admittedly quite a minor one - your webmaster had had with one of the Primary Health Care doctors
At least he had the honesty to say that he didn't care in the slightest about my problem - and one must assume that he didn't know of any one in his whole organisation who did, or if he did, he wasn't about to suggest who they might be.
His suggested solution - if you could call it a solution - appeared to be that, if patients had problems with doctors, (or GPs had problems with a specialists,) that they should just keep on stumbling around until they found a "clinician" with whom they didn't have any problems.
So he suggested that I should go away and let him and his fellow managers get on with their business of making money, and suggested further that the fact that I had dared to raise a problem with him was a very clear indication that I was some sort of a "bad guy."
(I sent him this letter in which I sought to set out my "status and/or motivation" and never got a response.)
At the time Dr Bateman wrote his letter, his shares were $6.10. Today they closed at $3.76 - almost a 40% drop. Perhaps this has something to do with the attitude revealed in his letter - one would hope so!
(Less than 15 months earlier they had been over $13.50!)
The bottom line: In our experience, management people never care about the performance of the doctors they manage, at least as far as their patients are concerned.
 
Doctors in a Primary medical centre suddenly don't have access to their patients records put together over many years, which, we believe, MUST obviously result in lower quality health care for their patients.
Although this has been reported to us by someone we consider to be a very reliable source, we are saying nothing further until we hear from Dr Bateman.
We emailed Dr Bateman this letter on 23 Oct 2008 and are awaiting his reply.
 
About 15 Jun 2008, we became aware that one of the doctors in one of Dr Bateman's medical centres wasn't registered to practice as a doctor in New South Wales - or so it appeared.
We did a search on the Register of Medical Practitioners on the NSW Medical Board's website and his name wasn't there.
So we emailed this letter to Dr Bateman. More.
 
On 3 Jun 2008, we emailed Dr Bateman this letter.
It was/is a letter about an extremely minor matter in relation to one of the doctors practicing in one of his medical centres. It's significance is that it is the only letter we have emailed to Dr Bateman that he has responded to - we have emailed him a number of letters about far weightier matters, but he hasn't even acknowledged them, let alone sent us a reply. More.
 
 
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Created: 26 Oct 2008 Updated: 20 Jan 2011