Police return files to psychiatrist

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33653, 1 October 1974, Page 1

Police return files to psychiatrist

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, September 30. The police today returned the files they had received from an Auckland psychiatrist in connection with a murder case. But doctors’ groups tonight repeated their call for an urgent re-examination of the law allowing the police to seize medical files.

The files were returned at 5.50 p.m. on instructions from the Commissioner of Police (Sir Angus Sharp).

The psychiatrist whose patient’s file was taken by detectives using a search warrant, Dr K. J. Newton, said that he was pleased to get the file back. “It must be reassuring to some people.”

The chairman of the New Zealand branch of the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (Dr J. R. E. Dobson) said it was “most encouraging.”

• In a protest against the seizing, other psychiatrists at the Remuera clinic where Dr Newton practises, publicly burnt about two dozen of their files. The files related to patients who had telephoned the clinic asking that their personal records be destroyed. The president of the Medical Association of New Zealand (Dr D. M. Matich) said tonight that a statement by the Minister of Police (Mr Connelly) changed nothing.

When the Minister said a suspected doctor’s records were liable to be seized, this left open the possibility that a patient’s medical records would become public knowledge. Mr Connelly’s statement that the records of a patient under police suspicion were generally not evidence of an offence, and so not liable to be seized, did not alter the law—and as that stood the police could seize such records with a proper search warrant. Mr Connelly’s statements on the most recent Seizure by the police contradicted his earlier statement that it was not his job to interfere in police investigations, Dr Matich said.

“If he has the right now he must have had the right before,” Dr Matich said, referring to the seizing under a search warrant by the police of 500 patients’ files from the Remuera abortion clinic earlier this month. Dr Dobson said the action

of returning the medical records seemed to reinforce his earlier comment that their being seized was not normal police practice. It also supported his view that such actions were likely to impair the co-operation between psychiatrists and the police. “Members of the public tend to believe that when

they seek help from people like psychiatrists, what they] tell them is confidential," he said. “If this belief is impaired, it will simply mean that either the doctors will not keep proper notes or they will burn them, as they are now doing at the Bexley clinic. 1 “More important, the' neople who really need pro-! fessional assistance from; nsvchiatrists will be deterred from coming to get it,” said; Dr Dobson.