A Sydney doctor who inherited $24 million from a patient after a lengthy legal battle in May with the deceased man’s ex-business partner, friends and The Salvation Army, has been found guilty of malpractice.
Dr Peter Alexakis was found guilty of professional misconduct and unsatisfactory professional conduct in the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) this week after the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) presented the case.
The patient, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and was referred to as Patient B by the tribunal, left Alexakis the bulk of his $27 million estate.
According to Sydney Morning Herald the HCCC alleged that the GP visited the cancer patient 92 times, or almost daily in the months leading up to the execution of the will.
Previous reports say the 83-year-old patient, who never married and had no children, wrote two wills two months prior to his death in 2017, leaving the money to Alexakis.
The tribunal found the visits to be “disproportionate to any professional or clinical purposes” and involved “blurring of the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship” but no sufficient evidence that the doctor had any part in the will changes.
They found Alexakis to be “obtuse or naive in not imagining that Patient B might have provided for him in his will”.
It was also reported that he failed to observed boundaries and interfered with treating doctors while the patient was in hospital throughout 2017.
It was the doctors from these hospitals, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and Concord Hospital, that issued a complaint to the HCCC.
