I am a middle-aged GP. As such, I have a while to go before I am likely to be subject to the mandatory health check for older doctors being pushed by the Medical Board of Australia.

But I will be the one doing the health checks if the task is assigned, as the medical board is suggesting, to the GPs of late-career doctors.

I believe this should be in the realm of occupational physicians, but the board has been saying this is too expensive.

Its principal reason for this new regulatory requirement is patient safety. The medical board has made a big thing of its statistic that practitioners aged 70 or over are 81% more likely to be subject to a notification than their younger peers.