Recently Tasmanian solicitors have started asking local Independent Medical Examiners (IME’s) to confirm compliance to Expert Witness Codes of Conduct in line with standard interstate practice.

See link to Supreme Court Practice Directive below:

Practice Direction 1 of 2016 – Expert Witness Code of Conduct

It is also of note that the AMA recently updated its guidelines relevant to this area of medical practice. See link to the revised AMA Guideline below:

Ethical Guidelines on Independent Medical Assessments 2010. Revised 2015

Adherence to the principles contained in these two documents is important to maintain confidence and integrity of IME assessments.

The following sections of the Supreme Court Rules (particularly (i) below) have, in my experience, not been routinely followed by IME assessors working within the Tasmanian workers compensation jurisdiction and I expect adoption of this code will result in an improvement in report standards:

(h) the extent to which any opinion which the expert has expressed involves the acceptance of another person’s opinion, the identification of that other person and the opinion expressed by that other person; 

(i) a declaration that the expert has made all the inquiries which the expert believes are desirable and appropriate (save for any matters identified explicitly in the report), and that no matters of significance which the expert regards as relevant have, to the knowledge of the expert, been withheld from the Court; 

(j) any qualification of an opinion expressed in the report without which the report is or may be incomplete or inaccurate; 

(k) whether any opinion expressed in the report is not a concluded opinion because of insufficient research or insufficient data or for any other reason; and 

(l) where the report is lengthy or complex, a brief summary of the report at the beginning of the report. 

Peter Sharman