Professor Freiberg was Dean of Monash Law School between 2004 and 2012. His expertise is in sentencing, regulation and non-adversarial justice.  He was the inaugural Chair of the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council between 2004 and 2022.  He is currently a member of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency Management Committee and has over 180 publications in the areas of law, criminology and regulation.

Investigations by regulatory authorities into complaints made against health practitioners can have significant emotional, personal, financial and reputational consequences. The effects on practitioners can include shock, shame, anxiety, depression and suicide as well as loss of professional identity and social isolation. They also affect those who make complaints.

What legal, ethical or other obligations does a health practitioner regulator owe to the people it regulates, to those who submit notifications and to the public at large? What is a regulators’ accountability to parliaments and to the community? What is the role of trauma in investigations and is it possible to adopt a trauma-informed approach to regulation to help minimise potentially serious risk to the life, health and well-being of those directly or indirectly involved in investigations?

This presentation will explore a model of justice that can be applied to persons adversely affected by investigations without derogating from the regulator’s overarching statutory duty to protect the public.