Australia's Doctor Death
Australian True Crime
Bravecasting
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2026
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Award winning journalist Hedley Thomas joins us to discuss Sick to Death, his podcast and bestselling book examining the case of Dr Jayant Patel, the Bundaberg surgeon accused of causing patient deaths after being barred from practising in the United States.
In this conversation, he unpacks how the investigation uncovered deep failures within Australia’s health system and the extraordinary courage of a nurse who chose to speak up.
You can listen to "Sick To Death" now, wherever you get your podcasts.
You can watch our episodes by visiting our Youtube Channel here.
Lifeline on 13 11 14
13 YARN on 13 92 76 (24/7 crisis support phone line for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples)
1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732
Blue Knot Helpline: 1300 657 380
CREDITS:
Host: Meshel Laurie
Guest: Hedley Thomas
Executive Producer/Editor: Matthew Tankard
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Email the show at AusTrueCrimePodcast@gmail.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie, and our guest this week is the one and only |
| 0:04.7 | Headley Thomas. He's back with us to talk about his latest podcast, which comes from his first |
| 0:10.1 | book, Sick to Death. It's the result of his investigations into the Queensland Health |
| 0:14.7 | System in the early 2000s for the Courier Mail newspaper. Headley was writing in real |
| 0:20.2 | time about the frightening state of affairs, |
| 0:22.8 | including the many botched surgeries taking place in Bundaberg |
| 0:26.4 | under Dr Jayant Patel. |
| 0:28.8 | joins us to talk about it. |
| 0:31.5 | This is Australian True Crime. |
| 0:33.9 | We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, |
| 0:38.3 | the Wurundri Woiwurang people of the Kulin Nation. |
| 0:42.1 | And a warning. |
| 0:43.5 | This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. |
| 0:49.6 | One of the appalling cases that was uncovered quite by chance during the unraveling of the Queensland Health System after the disclosures about Dr. Patel concerned a person who was known as Dr. Berg. |
| 1:10.5 | He was working as a psychiatrist at a public hospital in Queensland |
| 1:15.8 | and had been for some time employed by Queensland Health. And Dr. Berg was discovered to not be |
| 1:23.9 | a doctor at all. He had no medical qualifications, therefore he had no psychiatric |
| 1:28.8 | qualifications. And for most of his employment as a psychiatrist, he had been making bizarre |
| 1:37.1 | treatment decisions for very vulnerable men, women and children who were seeing him, |
| 1:42.9 | taking them off their medication or prescribing |
| 1:45.6 | medication, which was completely inappropriate. And turns out he had been a school teacher |
| 1:54.0 | in the former USSR who completely fabricated his qualifications to be a psychiatrist. |
... |
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