Leong Ng

Dr Leong Ng (MA, MB, BChir (Cantab), Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (FRCP), Member of the Academy of Medicine (Malaysia) is a consultant physician and specialist medical oncologist and private general practitioner in itinerant independent contractor practice.

Coming from two generations of a large family of doctors in Malaysia, UK, USA, Middle East and Australia, he continues in non-permanent private and public practice overseas and more recently in Australia. Leong has, in order to meaningfully support his family, lived away in an itinerant manner from them since 2006, when his daughter was aged five.

Born in British Malaya of Chinese ethnicity, he attended boarding school for later schooling in England and speaks English as his first language. He read Natural Sciences, then Medicine, at Trinity College, Cambridge University and visited Western Australia to work as a GP during his Internal Medicine training in 1981. Later, he spent four years (three as a Kuok Scholar) at the University of Sydney and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, training as a Medical Oncologist (Cancer Physician).

Since having been recruited to Australia in 2003, Leong had faced persistent bullying and persecution by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP), which finally “recognised” him with false and frivolous damaging caveats in 2006. These were later rescinded on two onerous appeals.

More recently, Leong tactically breached a private perpetual confidential deed of release signed with Ballarat Health Services, a publicly funded entity, which he had honoured and endured for a period of ten years since 2005. This was done in the public interest, after having formally informed the Victorian Health Minister and the Ombudsman.

In early December 2015, Leong was interviewed by the ABC and the programme later televised that month together with a web write-up. A follow up interview resulted from the damning Justicia Report with other reports in Aug 2016. A follow up ABC Radio interview took place.

In 2004, because Leong was vulnerable as an overseas recruited non-immigrant who had resisted many facets of the Australian work place bullying culture, he was targeted with false and frivolous allegations (a sham peer review) by some colleagues and bureaucrats – which led to the confidential deed.  

With bureaucrats taking advantage of the deed, among several falsities portrayed were difficulties in "communication skills", which, later resulted in the NSW Medical Board insisting he take a written English test and attend a formal communication course as part of this registration requirement and "difficulty in getting along with others". Leong did not and overcame this with a good reason: that the RACP had poorly communicated with the NSWMB. Instead, he did an interactive course on managing bullying — something which he found ineffectual in real life situations.

Inspired by Gandhi’s assertion of not giving one’s dignity to any bully, Leong set aside his application to join the RACP fellowship indefinitely in 2006, whilst inviting the Board and the RACP to resolve the matter justly. This was after he discovered that the RACP was (and is) a private limited company set up on 1 April 1938, with the "royal" title being just granted as a “permission to use” by the previous Sovereign. To date, resolution has not happened but there is now some hope with the breach of the deed.

Not surprisingly, not possessing the FRACP remains a disadvantage practising as a consultant physician in Australia, though, unknown to many, Medicare recognises non-holders as consultant physicians through s3DB of the Health Insurance Act 1973 (Cth).

From 2006, serious malfeasant actions by the NSW Health and the NSW Medical Board ensued after Leong was forced to “blow the whistle” after attempted double dipping with his non-claims Medicare Provider Number, at the Tweed Hospital. What was falsely relied on was misinformation embedded in the medical boards by the RACP. 

Between 2007 and 2011 Leong had to earn his livelihood and support his family outside Australia. During this time, he took legal action against the NSW Medical Board, which had refused him a Certificate of Good Standing but which relented with their non-disciplinary false “performance” statements on file about him after a Directions Hearing in April 2009.

In 2011, Leong succeeded in returning to Australia as a medical practitioner. This was due to the independent and lawful restoration of a lapsed general WA registration, based on his GP stint as a young doctor in 1981, restored in 2009 (before the legal action against the NSWMB). As there was already specialist recognition, AHPRA Specialist Registration was also automatically achieved in Oct 2010 when WA joined the national scheme under “national law”.

The matter of mismanaging misinformation was under scrutiny in a NSW Parliamentary Inquiry as were some workings of the Queensland government by a Select Senate Committee. As expected, no useful decisions have so far resulted. However the recent Senate Inquiry on Complaints in Medical Processes of the Australian Parliament and the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry on ‘Off protocol prescribing of chemotherapy” now offer some hope. Leong’s own lengthly submission was part published.

Leong has for several years persistently and voluntarily worked to assist colleagues who have been damaged by colleges or medical boards via frivolous allegations and complaints. Working with his friends and colleagues, this has now resulted in the registration as a not-for-profit organisation, the Health Professionals Australia Reform Association (HPARA) and the public revelation of an increasing number of many "closet" cases.  He is a Committee Member of HPARA and also chairs the Honest Peer Review Group.

He has also appeared as a confidential witness in a NSW statutory inquiry before Mr P Garling SC (now a Supreme Court Judge) in 2008, returning to Australia at his own expense, whilst languishing in a developing country in 2007 due to Australian systemic challenges.

Leong was also previously adjunct clinical lecturer in general practice and consultant physician at James Cook University School of Medicine and Part Time Senior Lecturer in Medicine at Melbourne University Rural Clinical School, when he first arrived from the UK. Between 2013 and 2016 he worked mainly as a fly in, fly out Rural Generalist doctor.