Established in November 1995. The Australasian College of Legal Medicine provides a network for doctors and dentists who have completed dual qualifications in law and Medicine or dentistry, or whose areas of practice are impacted by the law and who have consequently elected to undertake internal College or external training to gain at least a basic understanding of the law as it applies to their practices for the benefit of their patients.
The aim is to provide the medical profession and the community with a better understanding of the legal implications involved in the practice of Medicine and provide unique medical and legal insight into many medical issues not available to non-dually qualified doctors lawyers. Legal Medicine represents four broad areas of medical practice encapsulating the fields of Civil Legal Medicine, Criminal or Forensic Legal Medicine, Medical Ethics, and medical practice areas affected by statute law, such as the Health Insurance Act, Trade Practices Act, etc.
A significant task confronting the College is to begin to develop a curriculum. There are two streams, legal and forensic, each of which shares core knowledge and its specific requirements. The Basic Law Intensive (BLI), the Advanced Law Intensive (ALI), and the Expert Witness (EW) Course are designed to provide intensive exposure to the College curriculum but cannot cover all areas of knowledge and are not sufficient on their own to achieve Fellowship or Membership qualifications.
For a Fellowship qualification, the College Articles of Association currently requires, among other things, a Master level qualification in legal Medicine or Forensic Medicine, or a Bachelor level legal degree. For a Membership qualification, a diploma level degree is required and the BLI, ALI, and the EW course. Common to both Fellowship and Membership is the requirement to complete an examination conducted by the College. Waiving the examination requirement should be the exception, not the rule.
The Australasian College of Legal Medicine currently conducts four short courses, generally over the calendar year. These are the Basic Law Intensive (BLI), the Advanced Law Intensive (ALI), the Expert Witness Course, and the recently introduced Cause of Death Workshop. The BLI and the ALI are each run over two days, usually weekends. Both these courses derive their content from the principles that underpin the area of law known as medical or health law. Medical law is concerned with the relationships between health professional and patient, health professional and health facility, health facility and patient, and health care organization. However, the courses examine the legal issues from the doctor or dentist's perspective, practicing clinical Medicine or dentistry, not specifically from the legal practitioner's perspective. As such, the focus is on clinicians understanding the increasingly complex legal framework within which they work, and not with the legal practice issues such as bringing on or defending a cause of action.
