Hi, It's Claire Harvey from The Australian.

I'm jumping into the feed to let you know there's a new Headley Thomas show live right now on Apple Podcasts and The Australian.

It's called Sick to Death and it's the true story of Australia's own so called doc to Death.

Headley and I chatted about it on our daily news podcast, The Front.

We're going to play that conversation for you and to listen to Sick to Death, go to Sick to Death podcast dot com or search Sick to Death in Apple Podcasts.

Are subscribers here episodes first.

You can sign up today or link your existing The Australian subscription within Apple Podcasts to start listening right now.

Here's my conversation with Headley, Australia's favorite podcaster.

The Australian's own national chief correspondent, Headley Thomas is back on the air today with Sick to Death, an exploration of one of the most remarkable stories of the sense how a surgeon was implicated in the death and serious injury of scores of patients and earned himself the nickname DoD to Death.

Today, the Australians bringing Headley's book by the same name to life with a gripping piece of audio storytelling.

My name is Headley Thomas.

In two thousand and five, my reporting exposed shocking medical negligence at the heart of a major healthcare system.

An overseas trained surgeon who was nicknamed docor Death by the nurses, doctors and hospital administrators left patients mutilated, incapacitated, even dead.

Sick to Death is based on my book of the same name, and it's the true story of doctor Jan Patel's lies and manipulation and the herculean effort it took to finally stop him.

Indian born American surgeon jay and Patel was director of surgery at the Bunderberg Base Hospital between two thousand and three and two thousand and five.

The reporting of Headley Thomas, plus the courage of whistleblowing nurse Tony Hoffman and crusading local MP rob Messenger, brought Patel's misconduct to light.

A Commission of inquiry in November two thousand and five found thirteen patients died because of his negligence and many more suffered complications.

The United States Marshals collected the doctor from a Portland prison on Wednesday.

Morning, they took him to Los Angeles.

Pattel was extradited from the US to Australia to face trial, and was convicted and jailed in Queensland in twenty ten on three counts of manslaughter and one of grievous bodily harm that related to surgeries on four patients.

The convictions were quashed on appeal in twenty twelve after the High Court ruled he'd suffered a miscarriage of justice, triggering his release from prison.

The sixty two year old was released from jail last Friday after the High Court found a gross miscarriage of justice occurred during his trial in twenty ten.

In the trial, allegations were made not only about my competence as a doctor, were also going to the root of my character and my descency as a human being.

After two failed retrials, one of which resulted in a manslaughter acquittal, Queensland prosecutors dropped all criminal medical negligence charges against Pateel in twenty thirteen, and he pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud.

He admitted lying to Queensland authorities by hiding his American disciplinary history to get the Bunderberg job and was given a two year suspended prison sentence.

He flew out of Australia the following day.

AM long and very difficult journey.

I'm pleased that you saw, and I'll be going back to my life and my word.

In twenty fifteen, a Queensland tribunal ordered Patel never be registered in a medical profession in Australia again.

And now we've found him in Portland, Oregon, where Patel now lives.

My name is Ellie Dudley.

I'm a Patel was out for a walk when he was approached by our reporter Ellie Dudley and our videographer Quint Brewer.

I'd really love to sit down and interview you and chat about the events in Bunderberg in the early two.

Thousand Agoah completely forgot about it and I'm beyond that.

Yeah, I would really love to.

Sit down with you as has done this history.

And hear about your what you've got to say about what happened.

You've got nothing to say.

No, no, no, I don't react to stupid criticism, So I'm on my life.

I'm fine.

Yeah.

Do you think you were treated poorly or.

Don don't worry about it.

Helly, what was your response to hearing that from Jan pattel Well.

I think he was trying to put a brave face on what must have been one of the most incredibly painful chapters in his life.

A man with an oversized ego, very bombastic and confident and manipulative and dishonest surgeon who came to Australia having lied about his background in the United States, having lied about the negligence and the investigations that led to him being very severely disciplined and barred from practicing the surgery that he then decided that he would practice in Australia in a public hospital when he was welcomed with open arms, And when he said that, when he said he'd forgotten, well do we ever forget something like that?

Imagine his life was upended, the lives of many other people had been ended by his surgery, and he went to jail, he served time behind bars.

So I don't think he was being truthful when he said he had forgotten about it.

This story was absolutely enormous.

It went around the world, and of course it captivated Australians and I think it shook some of our faith in the health system that we do like to trust.

But your work at.

The Brisbane Career Mail at the time started, like a lot of stories do, with something very simple at Google search.

Tell me about the genesis of the story and what did you google?

Yeah, well, back then, Claire, it was April two thousand and five and smartphones were something you know, I don't think we actually knew of if we used mobile phones, sure, but they didn't have the capacity for Internet and downloads a.

Big data file.

So I had been.

In Bunderberg, this regional city short flight from Brisbane.

I'd gone up there to investigate the concerns of a nurse who had been in touch with me, Tony Hoffman.

This nurse had told me about a surgeon that she said was dangerous, was killing patients.

Heddley met other nurses, including Karen Jenner, who told him, of course, doctor Bateell didn't become a bad surgeon overnight.

I asked her what do you mean by that, and she said, well, you know, he's in his fifties, he's been practicing surgery for a long time.

He didn't become this bad overnight.

And I said, in front of Tony and Karen and the other nurses who had taken a big risk after their shifts to come and talk to me, said, so, do you mean that where he's practiced previously, there's probably going to be similar issues.

There'll be a trail of problems, badly damaged patients where he's previously worked.

And they all said, yeah, absolutely, that's right, that's what they'll be.

And I couldn't sleep that night in this little budget motel in Bunderberg because I kept thinking about that comment and what it possibly meant.

And the next day I flew back to Brisbane and as I said, we didn't have smartphones, so I had to go.

Back to my desk in the newspaper building.

I wanted to go.

Straight home, it had been a difficult assignment, but instead I went to my desk to perform that online check.

It was a Google search.

I literally googled Dr J.

Patel and disciplinary history or words to that effect, and a PDF with the details of Dr Patel's disciplinary record and the findings against him in Portland, in the United States and in New York State suddenly appeared and I realized, holy crap.

And that day, well, that night, we scrambled to remake the front page and write a feature article about it with the headline why.

Didn't they check?

You went on to win the Gold Walkley twice, Australia's highest honor for journalism.

You're one of the world's most respected investigative journals.

Did that experience of googling something that I think as a journalist you might have thought, of course they would have checked that.

Of course people would have checked.

That teach you something about asking those basic questions that you might assume have already been answered.

Yeah.

Absolutely, I mean if I as a journalist.

Two years after Patel's employment at Bunderberg Hospital, two years in which he's been the subject of internal complaints, there were even issues raised in the State parliament.

First person to discover that he's got this terrible record in the United States, which meant that he shouldn't have been employed to prepare a cut finger, let alone to sophagectamies and other very serious operations.

It just underlines why journalism can make such a powerful difference.

We need to come along and keep doing those and asking questions.

Coming up.

The whistleblower who worried Headley would think she was crazy, she.

Became known as the whistleblower.

But for the people of Bundenberg and Queensland, Tony Hoffman risked everything to save their lives.

A nurse in the local hospital, Tony stood alone against doctor Bottel, a senior surgeon who she believed responsible for the deaths of pace.

She fought hard to be heard.

Something that's a characteristic of your journalism is forming relationships of deep trust and friendships really with whistleblowers and sources.

In this case, it's Tony Hoffman, the nurse who you spoke about, who's carried a very heavy burden from being the person who blew the whistle on Jan Betel.

You've done a lovely interview with Tony as part of this series where she talks about your first face to face meeting where she was very emotional.

You know, she was very worried, she was very afraid, but she was trying to get you to trust her and to believe it even though she was very upset, she was telling the truth.

I mean, I was frightened.

I was living on adenaline.

I was talking really fast.

I was so scared.

I was crying all the time.

So I was emotionally distraught.

So I was presenting myself like that, So it's hard for people to understand that you can still be credible but be emotional.

That's a really interesting dynamic, isn't it the journal who needs to be able to trust your sources.

But often people who blow the whistle are, because of the trauma of doing that, very emotional.

They seem that they might not be credible.

Did you know from the start that you could trust Tony?

I had a gut feeling that I could trust Tony, but we were wary of each other.

And often that's the start of a relationship with your source or whistle blowing contact.

You're really trying to work out what the potential weaknesses are and whether the person looks like they've lost their marbles because of the fact they've been trying to blow the whistle about something of great importance and public interest for a long time and no one's listening, or whether they've lost their marbles and they're just making stuff up.

With Tony Hoffman, I believed her because I had myself done quite a lot of reporting before meeting Tony about Queensland Health, and I was aware of the incredibly deceptive and downright dishonest conduct of senior people in Queensland Health in covering up big problems.

I'd also done a lot of reporting on the challenges facing patients and health administrators when it came to overseas trained doctors.

Australia had and still has a great shortage of doctors, so we were importing doctors from overseas.

We needed them, particularly in areas of need, rural and regional areas, and Queensland needed them more than anywhere at that time, but we were not properly vetting the doctors.

And I had done a series of stories back in that period, shortly before I broke the Betel story, and that series focused on how overseas trained doctors without proper credentials, who hadn't been checked out thoroughly and had been given jobs of responsibility, had caused a lot of harm and it was being swept under the rug.

And I remember when I started writing those stories and asking questions to develop those stories, getting some raised eyebrows from people and having to sort of answer their questions about whether this was some kind of racist line and reporting where we were attacking the overseas trained doctors, many of whom were from countries like India, and Pakistan and so on, because they weren't white and nothing could be further from the truth.

It was about upholding standards of care and ensuring that the Australian public was protected.

But what we discovered as a result of the inquiries that were held after the Hell scandal really blew up was that in Queensland we were not just getting doctors from overseas who were incompetent.

We were employing people who pretended to be doctors, one of whom was a Russian fellow who had no experience in psychiatry and had been employed as a psychiatric registrar and had done a lot of damage to the patients by telling them all they didn't need their medication.

And he got away with this for a long time, and a number of psychiatrists who assessed him said, oh, we.

Thought it was pretty good.

It'd never been to medical school.

We've worked together at The Australian for years now and we've made quite a few of your big investigations.

We always seem to do it the hard way.

I think that's you, that's your fault.

And in this one, we've brought this story to life with nearly two hundred voice actors, a beautiful production led by our audio lead Jasper Leak and supported by producers Kristin Amyot, Stephanie Coombs and leott Semaglue.

It sounds absolutely beautiful.

You and I have talked a lot over the years about why audio is a great way to tell big stories like these, long stories like this.

What do you think it is about sick to death that lends itself to a listen rather than a read.

It's a chilling story, and there's intimacy and partnership, you know, for a journalist who back in two thousand and five, I was thirty eight, I was probably you know, well cynical by then, but I wasn't prepared for what was uncovered in that saga.

We were able to lift.

The lid on that as a result of this crisis surrounding a doctor Patel in a regional hospital, which just then widened into a massive and I think veryortan't investigation of the entire health system, and it showed what can be made possible when you start with something small and the damage and the ripples go out.

And these lessons are still around today, Claire.

Some things have changed for the better.

Some things haven't and we need to be constantly reminded of this.

I am in no doubt that across Australia today there will be doctors, surgeons and people pretending to be doctors who shouldn't be there, who are incompetent or fraudulent, who are just impostors, and we have to be always vigilant about that.

Ketley Thomas is the Australian's National Chief correspondent and his investigation Sick to Death is available now at Sick todethpodcast dot com, in Apple podcasts and in the Australians Mobile app