You’re ‘preaching to the converted’, OA.
[W]hy do we have (in my case) a suburban GP in a remote city and an ex accounts payable clerk overriding my DAME who is a senior medical specialist and held in high regard by the medical community who has passed the CASA 3 month course to become a DAME ?
CASA is ‘the Authority’. Avmed are exercising their ‘authority’. They are doing it in the name of ‘the safety of air navigation’. Can there be a more noble cause?
I’ve said it publicly before: Any idiot with access to the internet can do what CASA Avmed currently does. You’re just one of a myriad of victims of someone in CASA who’s decided - based on their googling and ‘cherry picking’ of studies - that some ‘condition’ has more significant implications than your DAME reckons it has and requires more significant ‘management’ than your DAME has decided it needs. Far more intrusive, expensive and potentially risky testing, perhaps with restrictions or ‘grounding’ in the interim? And that’s assuming that you’re ‘lucky’ enough not to be the victim of plain incompetence, like the circumstances highlighted by the DAME’s submission that I quoted earlier.
I, too, hope that Dr Manderson is able to bring (back) objectivity to the PMO role, rather than let Avmed continue to be run on the basis of cognitive bias that has resulted in very harmful overreactions to the objective risks. But I’m not holding my breath.
I wrote to the new CASA CEO shortly after her appointment, inviting her to deal with just one simple example of systemic unlawful behaviour of CASA Avmed – acknowledged as unlawful by CASA – and still manifested in Avmed documentation. You’d like to think that the CEO of a government agency would not want the agency to appear to be persisting with acknowledged unlawful behaviour – especially when it is so evident and easy to rectify. But no: I received some dissembling sophistry from one of her underlings and, when I invited her to review that response, Ms Spence said she had nothing to add.
You see: You can’t let minor issues like CASA’s compliance with the law get in the way of a cause as noble as the safety of air navigation. Ditto your DAME’s expertise and professional judgment. CASA Avmed ‘knows’ better – they’ve done some googling and had a meeting to discuss the dire implications - and they have the power to impose their opinions on us guinea pigs. Welcome to the hutch.
Unless the Senate Committee is going to bring about legislative change, its inquiry and its ultimate findings will remain of little practical relevance to CASA. Avmed doesn't apologise for the kinds of circumstances highlighted in the DAME's submission to the inquiry. It's just inevitable collateral damage in the fight for the noble cause of the safety of air navigation.