state watchdog agencies including the CMC failed to protect patients from dangerous doctors

http://m.news.com.au/QLD/pg/0/fi1554357.htm

Can physicians regulate themselves?

[E]very doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquet [sic] by giving him away. — Bernard Shaw, Preface on Doctors, The Doctor's Dilemma, 1911

Patients want and need to have confidence in their physicians. Yet confidence in physicians is waning. In part this reflects the more generalized public distrust of experts and authority figures that has become characteristic of our age. But the public is increasingly aware that the quality and oversight of medical care are uneven. They are aware of an unexpectedly high frequency of adverse events,1 of reports of hospital and professional mismanagment, such as the pediatric cardiac surgery deaths in Winnipeg,2 and of professional malfeasance, whose most spectacular modern example is the murder of 250 patients over a 27-year period by Dr. Howard Shipman, a British family physician. 

http://www.cmaj.ca/content/172/6/717

"It is plainly not possible for a trust to be, and to be seen to be, 'independent' in investigating a death which may have been caused or contributed to by failures of its own staff or systems."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/may/26/campaign-deaths-mental-health-patients