Health regulators have long faced criticism that they lack transparency and that they hide information about their members from the public. This criticism is often frustrating for regulators, particularly because a regulator’s governing statute often prevents them from disclosing the information.
However, every enabling statute allows regulators to share at least some information with the public, and one of the primary ways that regulators achieve transparency is through their public registers. As many readers of this newsletter will know, a regulator’s public register is typically a searchable database found on the regulator’s website that contains the names of all members (and sometimes former members) along with specific information about each member, including whether the member has been subject to disciplinary or other regulatory action. The public register is a great tool that can be used to uncover information about regulated professionals, but, unfortunately, many members of the public do not know that such registers exist, let alone how to access them. Some regulators even require that users answer skill-testing questions to verify that they are not “bots”, which arguably makes the information contained on the registers less accessible.
In our experience, when the average computer-savvy person wants to screen a healthcare professional, they turn to a search engine such as Google. Because of that, we wanted to see if a professional’s register entry (or any information from the regulator) would appear in Google search results. We therefore conducted our own informal survey where we Googled the names of members of the 26 healthcare regulators in Ontario under the Regulated Health Professions Act, 1991 to see what information was coming up on the Google search engine.
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