Growing Growlife Medical: on giving a green light to gendered abuse in Australian general practice (submission to Chair of RACGP Queensland and President of RACGP November 2024)

Online disinformation, spreading false allegations of mental illness, and an attempt to interfere with a colleague's right to practice: the growing of Growlife Medical

"This Lancet issue on women in medicine seeks to address … a “system imbued with gender bias.” … In discussions about equality in recent decades, principles of equality and justice have been increasingly crowded out by market logic and rhetoric." Fine and Sojo 2019, The Lancet p 5161 (1)

High level summary: Dr Chambers engages in illegal behaviour and vindictively attempts to damage my right to practice as he recruits patients and GPs into Growlife Medical

I’m a 64-year-old female Australian GP.

I am grateful to have enjoyed good mental health throughout my lifetime. I am grateful that I have not needed to live with a personality disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, or other mental health disorder, as so many of my patients have over the years. I have also at no time engaged in bullying and harassment.

Here is just one extract from Dr Aaron Chambers’s extraordinarily vindictive mandatory notification to Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) lodged with the Ombudsman on 25 April 2020, requesting that my right to practice be reviewed.

Dr Chambers lodged this mandatory notification in response to a public statement by the Possums charity which clarified that Possums had not rebranded as Growlife Medical and that Dr X was not a fully accredited Possums practitioner, despite Dr Chamber's claims in his promotions of Growlife Medical.

"I submit this notification as a mandatory report to AHPRA. … Dr Douglas’s behaviour … was so odd and disproportionate … that I wondered if she was suffering from an episode of a mental disorder, or a significant personality disorder. … Other clinicians and staff … expressed similar hypotheses of a mental health or personality disorder to me, although none of us had any conclusive proof … Her erratic, waxing and waning behaviour that triggers irrespective of passage of time or associated events, gives me reason to question if Dr Douglas has a serious and untreated personality disorder, bipolar disorder or other mental health disorder … Her comments border on delusions of grandeur, including claiming rights of ownership over the professional knowledge of others … With doctor suicides so prominent in recent times, and witnessing the team I care for be subject to such a prolonged period of bullying and harassment, I urge you to act. … It is the severe and persistent nature of Dr Douglas’s behaviour over a period longer than two years that gives rise to me believing that Dr Douglas requires serious investigation and sanctions by AHPRA.”

Dr Chambers's claims are not just nasty, but extreme - a vindictive attempt by a GP to damage or destroy a fellow GP's career, for the sake of financial benefit.

General practitioners are widely trusted and respected by the Australian community. Australians do not expect a GP to weoponise false claims (or even true claims, if that were the case) of mental illness. Australians do not expect a GP to engage in or facilitate false rumours about the mental health of a colleague.

You can find an example of Growlife Medical's online promotions which contains multiple misrepresentations of facts here. Screenshots taken 11 December 2024 are here.

Gender inequity in medical research

"Gender equity is not only a matter of justice and rights, it is crucial for producing the best research and providing the best care to patients." Clark and Zuccala 2019 The Lancet para 52 (2)

"Scholarship in implicit bias has helped to unveil a troubling gender bias in academia, whereby men’s competencies, skills, productivity, leadership potential and quality of work are consistently judged to be superior on the basis of gender identification alone." Pritlove et al The Lancet 2019 p 5023 (3)

I have invested 25 years of my professional life as a GP into developing the Possums (also known as Neuroprotective Developmental Care) programs, which address a specific and highly significant gendered gap in research-based clinical practice.

I worked on my 30 or so research publications and translated them into education programs on weekends, early mornings, late nights, holidays, bit by bit, day after day, year after year. It has been a labour of love, unpaid work funded by seeing patients in the clinic.

It's now accepted that health conditions exclusive to women are historically under-researched, and that women researchers in the biomedical sciences receive less start-up funding than their male counterparts (footnote A). It’s not surprising that from the very beginning, I faced a historical and institutionalised lack of interest in my general practice initiated clinical research into the care of women and their infants across the domains of breastfeeding, unsettled infant behaviour, and perinatal and infant mental health.(4)

General practice clinical research in particular is undervalued and underfunded (footnote B) within the medical sciences. Whilst career academics have a greater chance of securing funding, clinical guidelines developed from research by academics based in hospitals and universities often prove irrelevant in primary care.(5) It is extremely difficult for a primary care clinician-researcher to find funding for translational research such as mine, in the “brutally competitive grant culture of medical research”.(1, 4 para 7)

Given the enormity of these systemic obstacles, in 2013 I founded a charity as an independent platform for the dissemination of the Possums or NDC programs, which I called Possums for Mothers and Babies (footnote C). (I left the Possums charity in January 2023, when I resigned as Medical Director. The charity went into administration in August 2023 and is undergoing liquidation. You can find out more about this here.) I have always owned and continue to own all the Possums intellectual property (footnote D), by which I hope to contribute to change in health professionals' clinical practice and in parent wellbeing.

I set up a charity with only modest expectations of personal financial benefit from my work, being fundamentally commited to making a difference for families with babies. However, it became clear that my work and my research-based Possums brand - which Dr Chambers at no time purchased and which was at no time rebranded to become Grow Medical - became a matter of intense financial interest to an entrepreneur like Dr Chambers, because the Possums name attracted in patients, both locally and by telehealth nationally, and also attracted in GPs.

It appears that despite terminating my employment contract, Dr Chambers nevertheless judged that use of my and the Possums name remained essential for his commercial success, disregarding ethics or legalities, as he laid the foundations of the Growlife Medical practices.

Gender inequity in general practice

"Harassment and inequity in medicine are interdependent processes, and it is no coincidence that harassment is rife in environments that foster gender disparities in compensation, opportunity and advancement." Choo et al 2019 The Lancet (6)

"As family medicine has become more feminised over time, for example, the pay gap between family medicine and other specialities has widened considerably. ... Women [in medicine] are conferred less respect and status, experience greater workplace hostility and harassment … and experience higher amounts of invisible and uncompensated labour, particularly in terms of emotional labour, than men." Kang and Kaplan 2019 The Lancet p 582, 587 (7)

"The devaluation of women’s work in the health sector can also be linked to their disproportionate experience of violence and harassment in the workplace." Betron et al 2019 The Lancet p e25 (8)

The 2015 BEACH data confirmed my own experience in general practice these past 37 years: female GPs spend more time with patients on average than their male counterparts, deal with more problems per encounter, and earn substantially less.(9) But regardless, most of the GPs I have known in my lifetime, whether male or female or of non-binary gender, have not been primarily motivated by ambition for wealth or a high public profile (a high public profile is important for an entrepreneur who needs to recruit GPs in an environment of GP scarcity). In my experience, most GPs are before all else are values-driven and committed to the service of other human beings. Because of these characteristics, and because I've devoted much of my professional life to unpaid research and education develoment, I don't have money, and I've also not had the advantage of intergenerational wealth.

For twelve months, in 2011, I ran a little pilot Possums Clinic as a contractor at UQ HealthCare, in Annerley, Brisbane. Then the Possums charity opened an independent Possums Clinic in Highgate Hill in June 2015 as a clinical site for my ongoing development of the Possums (or Neuroprotective Developmental Care) education and research programs, alongside general practice services. By May 2016, the charity's new general practice was AGPAL accredited, having opened the doors less than one year prior.

When Dr Chambers introduced himself to me during a Possums Conference I’d organised in February 2017, he was taking steps to establish his own first general practice at Sherwood, Brisbane, then called Grow Medical (footnote E).

The Possums Clinic did not “[fall] on difficult times, with the doors threatening to close”, as the false narrative on Dr Chambers’s Growlife Medical webpage entitled The Possums Clinic (https://www.growmedical.com.au/the-possums-clinic) states. Our clinic was still a start-up and only just beginning to break even some months when I began discussions with Dr Chambers in May 2017 about aquisition.

But I was establishing and managing a brand new medical centre, as well as working three days in the clinic, bringing out parent programs, educating health professionals, organising conferences, publishing research, working hard to finalise development of the NDC Masterclasses and NDC Accreditation pathway, and reporting to and supporting the governance of the charity’s Board of Directors.

This is why the Possums Board made the decision to divest of financial risk and ease my workload, so that I could focus on developing my research-based Possums or NDC education programs. The Board sold our extensively refitted and renovated, boutique Highgate Hill practice to Dr Chambers in October 2017. Dr Chambers purchased the practice because of its excellent location, because of the multi-disciplinary health professionals and administrative staff I'd recruited, and because it had demonstrated healthy growth and good potential. The sale of the general practice included a royalty-free licence to use the title The Possums Clinic for three years until September 2020, on the condition that the Board approved of each usage of the Possums intellectual property.

The corporatisation of general practice has been a trend in Australia since the late 1990s. By 2019, a third of general practices had more than eleven GPs, and although about 60% of GPs are female, male GPs are twice as likely to be practice owners.(9) Now, high numbers of GPs worry about their workplace culture, at least according to a 2020 AusDoc survey in which forty-five percent of GPs responded that they believed corporatisation caused “serious” damage to general practice. Most GP respondents believed that corporatisation had done “some or serious” damage to general practice. Yet corporatisation brings important economies of scale.

Dr Chambers had told me prior to the purchase that he aimed to own the most general practice clinics of any general practice corporation in Australia by the end of his career. He talked a great deal about high ethical standards and a GP-led practice that was valuing of GPs. I believed that we were commencing a genuine and ethical partnership between Possums and Grow Medical.

Distressingly, in the months after the sale I discovered frequent and disorienting gaps between Dr Chambers’s words and my experience of his behaviours. In addition to my three clinical days, I found myself managing unsustainable demands upon my unpaid time for the benefit of Grow Medical. This included supervision of a Grow GP registrar, meetings, promotional events, and interactions with a practice manager whose previous qualification was 18 months as a medical receptionist but who now, I believed, lacked appropriate support and supervision.

The situation was compounded by breaches of the intellectual property licence, and unsettling interactions with Dr Chambers, who was often unavailable and who regularly failed to follow-up on the undertakings he gave in our meetings. I worked hard to keep these problems invisible to the other health professionals in the clinic. I explore just one illustration of the many difficulties I faced prior to my departure in footnote F. It was increasingly difficult for me to proceed with my program development and the planned launch of the NDC Masterclasses and Accreditation. I found the Grow Medical workplace dynamic exploitative and disrespectful.

I didn’t receive an acceptable response from Dr Chambers when I warned him in writing that the workplace situation wasn't sustainable for me. On Thursday 22 March 2018, after a final dreadful week, in which I worked about two days equivalent in unpaid promotions, registrar supervision, and addressing clinic management challenges, I called in to resign as Medical Director of The Possums Clinic and to take leave from clinical practice, effective immediately. I requested mediation between Dr Chambers and myself to address multiple problems which I felt needed to be resolved before I could return to clinical work.

It was not a surprise that the formal mediation process failed, though I put a great deal of time into preparing for it, developing documentation which I detailed both the problems and what I saw as possible joint pathways forward. It was not a surprise to me that after the mediation attempt, Dr Chambers and his lawyers ended my employment contract by email, effective immediately. What did shock me though was the extraordinary extent of confabulation in Dr Chambers’s letter of termination, which I was able demonstrate point by point with documented evidence in discussions with my medical indemnity lawyers. I didn't, however, wish to return to Grow Medical.

Dr Chambers makes an outrageous 'mandatory notification' of fabricated allegations of mental illness to AHPRA

Here is Dr Chambers's remarkably extreme and vindictive description of this period prior to my taking leave, written in his mandatory notification to AHPRA.

"I took Dr Douglas’s conduct at the time to be highly unethical, self-interested and at times a possibly delusional disregard for facts. … Throughout this time we have taken a measured and reasonable approach to deal with Dr Douglas. … I … took the view that, on balance, her behaviour could have been consistent with someone simply bent on personal financial gain, and that the situation could have simply been the consequence of a commercial disagreement. In hindsight, I believe this position may have been in error, and that I may have underestimated the lack of insight and judgement that Dr Douglas demonstrated, and its potential flow on to cause risk to the public. This has left me with a strong view that she suffers from some form of disorder that impairs her insight and judgement into her own actions. This leads me to hold significant concerns as to her insight and judgement into her own ability as a clinician …" Dr Chambers’s mandatory notification to AHPRA 25 April 2020

Strange things happen in the upside-down world of gendered harassment or violence (even when the violence is not physical or sexual, only financial, psychological, reputational). When a ‘difficult’ woman resists unethical or illegal or abusive behaviour, the bully cries out: “I am bullied!” When she takes a stand against false claims, the liar cries out: “She’s lying!” When lawyers send half a dozen letters over a two year period (and probono lawyers are very cautious, not wanting to incur any unnecessary cost) demanding that repeated misrepresentations of qualifications and misappropriation of a business name be addressed, he who harasses cries out: “I’m harassed!”

After the termination of my employment contract in April 2018, one of the health professionals who conducted Possums or NDC education with me told me that at the first staff meeting shortly after my departure, where people were crying, Dr Chambers told Grow Medical’s health professionals and administrative staff three things, which I knew to be false. She reported that Dr Chambers told staff he now had exclusive rights to the Possums intellectual property, that I was no longer legally entitled to practice in my home city of Brisbane, and that he’d been forced to terminate my contract due to my unreasonable behaviour.

The Possums Board withdrew the licence to use the Possums intellectual property including the title The Possums Clinic after Dr Chambers terminated my employment contract. But the termination of my employment contract heralded only the beginning, not the end, of my Growlife Medical ordeal (G).

In June 2018 the Board and I made the decision to email three key health professionals at Grow Medical who worked with patients in the post-birth period and offer them opportunity to become Accredited in delivery of the Possums or NDC programs. We made this offer, which was extremely generous given the toxic nature of Dr Chambers's communications and behaviours, for the sake of patients.

Dr X declined. The other two health professionals accepted, became NDC Accredited, and departed Grow Medical. Each told me they left because they found the situation at Grow Medical ethically compromising. We continued to work together regularly to educate health professionals in the Possums or NDC programs, the GP for the following year, the registered nurse for the next five years.

However, a fortnight prior to Dr Chambers’s mandatory notification, Dr X had submitted her own complaint about me to AHPRA, reporting extreme concerns aligned with those expressed by Dr Chambers. Referring to the same two health professionals who became NDC Accredited, Dr X falsely alleged: "Dr Douglas has enacted a prolonged campaign of bullying, intimidation and public defamation of the health professionals who remained with Growlife Medical, myself included. At least two practitioners have been so distressed by the harassment that they have left." Dr X’s complaint to AHPRA 14 April 2020

It seems to me that Dr X found herself in a morally compromised situation, and managed this by vindictively projecting her distress on to me. Dr Chambers and Dr X separately wrote that their AHPRA notifications were triggered by an online statement made by the Possums Board of Directors, which they each included as a screenshot in their reports. This carefully worded announcement was composed with the assistance of cautious probono lawyers and published by the Possums Board of Directors in a newsletter, on our website, and on our Facebook page. The statement declared that, despite the claims made by Dr Chambers on various website pages, Google Ads, and other online promotions:

1. The Possums charity is not Growlife Medical;

2. The Possums Clinic has never re-branded as Growlife Medical;

3. None of the health professionals practicing at Growlife Medical are NDC or Possums Accredited and entitled to promote themselves as delivering the Possums programs;

4. Growlife Medical website articles for patients are not consistent with Possums programs.

Our public statement was the culmination of two brief and respectful email approaches to Dr X, in particular, requesting that she desist from falsely promoting herself as a “highly experienced Possums practitioner” and as “fully accredited in the Possums programs” (H). Possums’ probono lawyers had also sent half a dozen letters to Growlife Medical lawyers, intermittently over a period of two years, requesting that Dr Chambers cease promoting false claims about Possums and Growlife Medical in online advertisements and website narratives. Dr Chambers wrote in his mandatory notification: “The impression of a disorder is most evident in [Dr Douglas’s] public behaviour.” The Possums Board’s announcement was the only public behaviour that either I or the Possums Board made on this issue.

It took three months for the Medical Board to complete its assessment of Dr Chamber’s mandatory notification and Dr X’s complaint. Finally, the Medical Board dismissed the complaints made against me, without investigation. They were a private business matter, the National Manager wrote, and not for consideration by AHPRA or the Medical Board.

GPs lack regulatory protection from gendered abuse

"Primary care in Australia is delivered by many thousands of small private businesses, with fragmented and variable funding arrangements … Governance and accountability are split between various levels of government and numerous separate agencies, making overall management of the system difficult. … [Given] weak system management, [there is] failure to establish national institutions who could guide … accountability." Mapping Primary Care in Australia, Grattan Institute 2018 (10)

"Potential corrective actions are hampered by a hierarchical, male-dominated culture [in medicine] that accepts abusive behaviour as part of professional socialisation and avoids holding offenders accountable." Choo et al 2019 The Lancet p 4996

"In the … biomedical and health-care workforce … [there is] little to no support or protection for targets of harassment or inequity; undue reliance on … lawsuits to focus organisational attention on harassment; a punitive environment for whistleblowers; minimal consequences for perpetrators of harassment … and absence of standardised approaches to ensure accountability." Choo et al 2019 The Lancet p 5006

As the editors of The Lancet’s ground-breaking 2019 theme issue on Advancing Women in Science, Medicine and Global Health observe, there is under-recognition of women’s experience of harassment and abuse in medicine.(2) I believe Dr Chambers lodged his extraordinary mandatory report because he was confident, firstly, that he would be protected by AHPRA and the Medical Board from accountability, and secondly, that I would be too ashamed to speak out about his allegations with others - or that if I did, this would only serve to confirm that I really did suffer a mental health disorder.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is a pervasive belief when it comes to women’s complaints about abusive or predatory behaviour. As one dear friend said anxiously when I told her about the content of the AHPRA complaints: “Oh my God, don’t tell a single soul! What if people actually believe it?” My friend knew that a particularly powerful unconscious contempt can be directed towards the older female outsider. Clever gaslighting makes it seem obvious she is psychologically twisted, vindictive, or mentally ill. She is dehumanised.

Dr Chambers’s complaint purports to be made on behalf of multiple unnamed clinicians, and in his notification to AHPRA, Dr Chambers self-reports discussions about my likely mental illnesses with multiple colleagues, “though none of us had conclusive proof.”

Retired Member of Parliament Kate Ellis, Minister for the Status of Women 2010-2011, discusses the toxic power of rumour in her 2021 exposé of gendered abuse in the Australian parliament. She writes:

"Staying silent, hoping behaviours will change, showing that we are strong enough to brush things off really isn’t helping anyone. … I will not sugar-coat some of the examples of women’s poor treatment, because I want it to be called out. I want it to stop." Sex, Lies and Question Time p 6 (11)

Would these extraordinary AHPRA mandatory reports have been lodged against a senior male GP-researcher whose work was respected and used by growing numbers of doctors and other health professionals? I think not. Would they have been lodged against me if I was married, let’s say, to a well-respected male non-GP medical specialist? I don’t believe so.

But against an older divorced woman, living alone, whose education and research work is often viewed as controversial because of its innovations? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Gendered abuse and the future of general practice

"Bringing safety and equity to its workforce is necessary to sustain the vitality of the health-care professions." Choo et al 2019 The Lancet p 5016

What does the future of general practice look like if online disinformation about general practice services lacks regulatory oversight? How is it possible for under-resourced research-based clinical innovations in a highly gendered field to survive if there are no consequences for misleading promotion of services, for false promotion of community-based education qualifications, or for spreading rumours of mental illness about another doctor?

As I write, the same two webpage headings entitled The Possums Clinic come up on Google searches for my work and Possums, clicking through to the Growlife Medical webpages which promote their specialised services for mothers and babies. Not far under a page heading The Possums Clinic (https://www.growmedical.com.au/the-possums-clinic), amongst multiple misrepresentations, Dr Chambers poses the question: “Is Growlife Medical and Possums Clinic the same?” then provides the false answer: “Yes. When Possums Clinic was purchased it was rebranded to Grow Medical.” A subheading “The Possums Clinic Rebrands” repeats the falsehood that “the Possums … Clinic has since been rebranded as part of Grow Medical”.

Patients have told me for years that they believe the Possums charity is the same as Growlife Medical, or that they are receiving Possums programs at Growlife Medical. I have gathered a great deal of evidence confirming this carefully cultivated confusion. The education information on the Growlife Medical website, and the clinical interventions which patients tell me they’ve received at Growlife concerning infant care or breastfeeding problems, clearly demonstrate that the Growlife mother-baby team offer various interventions which are not aligned with Possums or NDC.

I tell only three others, each a grey-haired woman of about my own age, that I’m writing this article. Two are friends. The other is a lovely psychotherapist I’ve seen intermittently for support.

I tell each woman in separate conversations how much I hate working on this article. That it takes so much time to write, days and weeks, and I don’t want to waste my precious life by even thinking about something so toxic! I tell them that I am miserable for days after putting time into it, as if soiled and stained and shamed. What difference will it make, anyway, to place myself at risk of further abuse in this way, and publicly? Writing this article is time lost from my education, research and writing work, I explain, and there’s never enough time for that - that’s what really matters!

These three grey-haired women listen thoughtfully and ask a few questions, respectfully. Then each says to me, separately, in her own way: “You have a responsibility to write about this. For the sake of other women.”

So I do. For the sake of other women.

By Dr Pamela Douglas 14 November 2024, final update 17 January 2025

Footnotes

A.

A UK analysis shows that less than 2.5% of publicly funded research is dedicated to reproductive health, even though one in three women suffer from a reproductive or gynaecological health issue.(12) A Canadian study of 24,000 grant applications found that when women are principal investigators, they are less likely to receive funding than men, and this is not due to the quality of the proposed research.(13)

B.

Less than 2% of NHMRC and 1% of the Medical Future Fund’s funding go into primary care research.(14,15)

C.

Over the ten years of its existence, the charity variously traded as The Possums Clinic, Possums for Parents with Babies, Possums Education, Possums Education and Research Centre, Possums & Co, and The Possums Collective.

D.

I had stepped off the Possums Board in 2021. I resigned as Medical Director after reporting to the Possums Board my grave concerns about the charity’s directions and ethics under the new CEO. The Possums Clinic (the real Possums Clinic, which we’d moved into a rented cottage in Sherwood in July 2022) was losing a large sum of money every week and faced multiple obstacles, which included Growlife Medical’s false promotion of its own clinicians’ services as The Possums Clinic, in the same suburb. I had strongly recommended closing the charity’s clinic’s doors, to protect the Possums education and research work and the NDC Rural project.

E.

Dr Chambers changed Grow Medical’s name to Growlife Medical after terminating my employment contract in April 2018. From mid-2017, prior to the sale of the Highgate Hill clinic infrastructure to Dr Chambers, the motto of the Possums programs has been “Growing joy in early life”.

F.

Sometime in the months after the sale, Dr Chambers’s practice manager scheduled a meeting between me and Growlife Medical’s registered nurse – in my lunch break in the middle of a Monday of back-to-back appointments. I discovered this the Thursday before and asked the practice manager (who still did a lot of reception work) to reschedule that meeting to the beginning or end of a day, as I felt I needed some kind of short lunch break to work safely. I can only think the practice manager took it out of my schedule but forgot to inform the RN, who drove over from another Growlife Medical clinic to see me anyway. I wasn’t there and didn’t know: I’d stepped out that Monday lunch-time to clear my head.

"The impression of a disorder … was also demonstrated clinically by an unwillingness to take on instruction from other members of the team such as when our nurse attempted to provide her familiarisation with clinic policies and procedures." Dr Chambers’s mandatory notification to AHPRA 25 April 2020

When Dr Chambers’s learnt that I hadn’t been there, he reprimanded me with an unnerving hubris, stating he was disappointed in my “failure to demonstrate leadership”. He did not believe me when I explained the mistake. There was something disturbing about his behaviour towards me over this. Eventually, after I’d escalated my concern about this interaction with him, Dr Chambers emailed an apology, one of those Clayton-type apologies which I accepted, nevertheless, continuing on as best I could in good faith.

G.

Here are just four samples of behaviours I and the Possums charity experienced after my departure.

• Dr Chambers emailed academics at the Centre for Children’s Health Research falsely claiming control over my research (8 May 2018). I had substantively invested in nurturing this research collaboration over a period of years. A health professional working at Growlife Medical, operating under misunderstandings, emailed: “I have had several conversations now with Aaron [Chambers] about whether in the research context Pam is able to deliver the content. He suggested that we discuss the possibilities so that I can have clarity and certainty.” In an email of response, copying in the research team, Dr Chambers wrote: “To confirm my position (and that of Sante Medical Services Pty Ltd), I am supportive of Pam continuing to participate in research in this space. I see no impediment to her clinical involvement in the strict context of an NHMRC funded clinical trial, where no fiduciary or commercial arrangement exists outside of undertaking research. … I would welcome consideration of practitioners at Highgate Hill being involved as a trial site.” My collaboration with this research team ended very painfully for me shortly after that, because these emails caused the team to lose trust in me, even though the emails misrepresented the facts and also failed to comprehend how collaborations, research and funding (let alone NHMRC funding) worked.

• The Growlife Medical practice manager tampered with the Possums website, redirecting visitors to the Growlife website (June 2018).

• Text which I’d written and published on the Possums website turned up copied and pasted onto Growlife’s website.

• At a Brisbane Essentials Baby and Toddler Exp, Dr X and other Growlife Medical staff interacted with the public at a stall promoted as The Possums Clinic both online and in the promotional brochure distributed hardcopy to thousands of parents, which I discovered only after I’d been on the podium delivering a talk about Possums (March 2019).

H.

Dr X completed Possums Introductory Workshops (12 hours CPD) in 2015. Initially, those who completed the Introductory Workshops were entitled to call themselves Possums Certified, because in 2015 these were known as Certification Workshops. But the Possums or NDC programs were continually under development, and from April 2018 when I launched NDC Masterclasses and Accreditation (equivalent to the current attributions of 25 + 50 hours CPD, respectively), which had all been discussed with Dr Chambers prior to the sale, the Board withdrew the term Possums Certified from use, as it confused and misled the public now that Possums or NDC Accreditation was being awarded to health professionals. Moreover, information in the 2015 Possums Introductory Workshops was by this time outdated. Dr X declined the opportunity to become NDC Accredited when we reached out to her in June 2018. Due to ongoing false promotions of Growlife Medical as a rebranded Possums Clinic, the Board made a subsequent decision not to allow Growlife Medical health professionals entry into our programs. We hoped to protect the public from unethical and misleading promotional behaviours.

References

1. Fine C, Sojo V. Women's value: beyond the business case for diversity and inclusion. The Lancet. 2019;393:515-516.
2. Clark J, Zuccala L. Advancing women in science, medicine, and global health. The Lancet. 2019;393:1.
3. Pritlove C, Juando-Prats C, Ala-leppilampi K. The good, the bad, and the ugly of implicit bias. The Lancet. 2019;393:502-504.
4. Van der Linden N, Roberge G, Malkov D. Progress toward gender equality in research & innovation - 2024 review. 2024.
5. Steel N, Abdelhamid A, Stokes T. A review of clinical practice guidelines found that they were often based on evidence of uncertain relevance to primary care patients. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. 2014;67(11):1251-1257.
6. Choo EK, Byington CL, Johnson N-L, Jagsi R. From #MeToo to #TimesUp in health care: can a culture of accountability end inequity and harassment? The Lancet. 2019;393:499-501.
7. Kang SK, Kaplan S. Working toward gender diversity and inclusion in medicine: myths and solutions. The Lancet. 2019;393:579-586.
8. Betron M et al. Time for gender-transformative change in the health workforce. The Lancet. 2019;393:e25.
9. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. General Practice: Health of a Nation 2019. East Melbourne, Victoria: RACGP, 2019.
10. Swerisson H, Duckett S. Mapping primary care in Australia. Grattan Institute, 2018.
11. Ellis K. Sex, lies and question time. Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books; 2021.
12. Collaboration UCR. UK Health Research Analysis 2014. London: Medical Research Council, 2014.
13. Witteman HO, Hendricks M, Straus S, Tannenbaum C. Are gender gaps due to evaluations of the applicant or the science? A natural experiment at a national funding agency. The Lancet. 2019;393:531-540.
14. Winzenberg TM, Gill GF. Prioritising general practice research. Medical Journal of Australia. 2016;205:529.
15. Manski-Nankervis J-A, Sturgiss EA, Liaw S-T, Spurling GK, Mazza D. General practice research: an investment to improve the health of all Australians. MJA. 2020;212(9):398-400.