Court case in sights of Kiwi eye doctors

By CHRIS DANIELS

A group of New Zealand eye surgeons, who are charged with colluding to stop foreign competition, will soon have their day in court.

The Commerce Commission and the Ophthalmological Society are appearing in the High Court at Wellington on Monday in the hope of setting a court date in their long-running legal stoush.

The competition watchdog has spent the past four years pursuing the ophthalmologists.

It claims they acted in an anti-competitive way to try to stop Australian specialists coming to New Zealand to perform cataract operations.

The Ophthalmological Society and five specialists are being charged with breaching the Commerce Act.

When it began the action in 1997, the commission said Southern Health, a crown health enterprise, was given Government money to perform an extra 225 cataract operations.

Southern Health tried to get the two Australian specialists to come to Invercargill to do the work.

The commission alleges the society and the New Zealand specialists colluded to ensure that the Australian ophthalmologists did not carry out operations.

It says one of the New Zealand surgeons, "aided and abetted by others, used his dominant position in a market" to prevent the Australian specialists carrying out the operations.

Plans for one of the Sydney surgeons to come to Southland fell through after he was apparently told it was not in his career interests to perform operations in Invercargill.

The second, a top Australian surgeon, dropped out when New Zealand eye surgeons failed to clear him to do the work.

This, the commission claimed, was a blatant breach of the law that bans anti-competitive behaviour.

The executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Ian Powell, said the commission should not have started the court case four years ago and should certainly not continue with it now.

Mr Powell said the case was a "clash of values" between a commercial, market-led approach to healthcare and traditional values of patient safety.

The then management of Southern Health, who are now all gone, had made no attempt to use New Zealand doctors for Invercargill cataract operations.

New Zealand specialists were required to provide supervision of the foreign doctors' work, which was hard to do if they simply flew in, did operations, then flew back home again.

Mr Powell said the old market-driven approach was now gone, making it even more pointless to keep pursuing the eye specialists.