Prevalence and characteristics of complaint-prone doctors in private practice in Victoria

To the Editor: We noted with interest the recent publication by Bismark and colleagues1 about complaint-prone doctors in Victoria. This research makes a valuable contribution to the important task of identifying practitioners who are at high risk of delivering poor quality health care. Similar analysis of more than 32 000 complaints received in Queensland from 1992 to 2010 has been undertaken by the Health Quality and Complaints Commission (HQCC). A summary of this work, which was performed in collaboration with the Medical Board of Queensland, was presented recently.2