Australia's Doctor Death

March 1, 2026·1 hr 7 min·6 clips

A fake psychiatrist from the former USSR with no medical qualifications was treating vulnerable patients in Queensland hospitals.

Hedley Thomas returns. Michelle Lorry sets the conversation around Sick to Death, his latest podcast, drawn from his first book and his early-2000s Courier Mail investigations into the Queensland health system. Bundaberg is where the story lands. It starts with botched surgeries under Dr Jayant Patel, then opens into a hospital system where some shocking facts seemed to surface almost by accident. One detail still sounds hard to believe. A man known as Dr Berg had worked as a psychiatrist in a Queensland public hospital with no medical qualifications at all. The tone is measured, but not distant. Hedley stays with the small, ordinary details because that is where the failure becomes clearest. Hand-washing becomes one of those details. The conversation sits with the idea that something so basic could be missing while Patel stayed in the role for two years. Michelle pushes on the human question. Why would a doctor with a public disciplinary record in the United States arrive in Bundaberg and act so confrontationally? Hedley keeps circling it without pretending there is a tidy answer. Patel's history in Portland, Oregon, may not have been front-page news, but it was there if anyone checked. That makes what followed harder to understand. Nurses made formal complaints, went outside the system, and eventually reached a local member of parliament. The pressure became public. That member stood in Queensland parliament in Brisbane and named Dr Patel as a public menace in a major regional hospital. From the outside, you might expect him to leave. Instead, Patel stayed, tried to negotiate a more lucrative salary, and kept talking up achievements and accreditations Hedley does not believe he really had. Michelle asks about personality. Hedley talks about speaking with a psychiatrist about what might make someone like that tick, while keeping the answer open. The ending eases only a little. Michelle praises Hedley's audio style, Hedley credits Jasper Leakey for the music and mix, and the episode points listeners toward information and support numbers in the notes.

As heard by us

A grim account of medical arrogance, missed warnings, and Queensland Health's failure to act quickly enough.

Australia's Doctor Death brings Hedley Thomas back to the Queensland Health scandal he reported on in the early 2000s, when botched surgeries at Bundaberg Hospital under Dr Jayant Patel exposed a system with alarming gaps in oversight.

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Why you'd press play

A surgeon with a documented trail of patient deaths in Oregon kept operating in Queensland for two years.

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