Dr Death may have been a difficult personality with a misplaced confidence in his own talents.

He may also have been a fraudster willing to cover up his chequered medical past, but he was not criminally negligent and his surgery, at least his surgery at Queensland’s Bundaberg Hospital, killed no-one.

But Dr Jayant Patel, who was tried, convicted and then cleared of manslaughter by the High Court of Australia more than a decade ago, has become the brand name for dodgy foreign doctors.

His name has resurfaced in the context of the latest political fix for the workforce crisis — the move by the Medical Board of Australia to create a new pathway to fast-track specialist IMGs whose qualifications are deemed largely equivalent to those obtained specialists here.