ACSCM demise

The Australasian College of Skin Cancer Medicine (ACSCM) was once a respected College offering quality evidence based education and training along with qualifications that had meaning. This is unfortunately no longer the case.

It all changed under the management of the five Board directors of the College elected in late August 2010.

ACSCM is now a pawn of industry and undue outside influences. The directors have openly allowed themselves to have education content manipulated by industry.

Like all Australian colleges, ACSCM had censors. In July 2010 the Censors directed that the Board members and educators sign strict conflict of interest declarations and that normal corporate governance controls be put in place in keeping with standard practice of medical Colleges. The Board refused. When the censors objected to the inappropriate industry input and raised the corporate governance issues, the directors moved to dismiss the Censors. Directors ignored the fact that the Censors were elected by the members. Directors overruled the member's wishes.

This Board continued to destroy the College. The Directors paid themselves to effect most of the College education programs. They altered content to be favourable to companies with which they had an association. They openly allowed industry to influence content.

Members then called an extraordinary general meeting to alter the constitution of the College. It was clear that major reforms were required to try to arrest this College destruction. Ten amendments were proposed. The College regulations were to be changed to require conflict declarations, prohibit industry influence and to ensure Censors could effect their job independent of the Board. The complete wording of the ten resolutions is below.

Large numbers of members signed proxy votes to support the needed reforms. We had assumed reform was in place. Voter turn out in College history had never been so high.

The five Directors became absurdly desperate in their attempts to avoid these restrictions to industry influence. In particular, the Directors had demonstrated they wanted to favourably distort education about a certain company, Allmedic, and its skin cancer products. The Board wanted to suppress information that severe and prolonged adverse events had been reported with Allmedic PDT. Several Board members were using and making profits from this PDT. The association between Allmedic and the Board of ACSCM became closeer than could ever be reasonably considered appropriate between any College Board and an industry company.

So next the Board used Allmedic's lawyers to develop a legal opinion that the Board could ignore the motions to alter the constitution!

The general meeting took place in March 2011. The President never even put the corporate governance reforms (below) to the vote!  He ruled the motions were out of order on the basis of the advice of Allmedic lawyers. He distributed the legal advice from this firm to those attending the meeting.

We sought a legal opinion regarding whether it was possible and appropriate for Allmedic and ACSCM to be using the same law firm. The advice was that whilst unusual, it was sometimes appropriate for two parties to share the same lawyer, - essentially when the interests and goals of both are one and the same. As such, the ACSCM directors were prepared to consider the College now one and the same as Allmedic.

ACSCM can now only be regarded as the "Allmedic Club of Skin Cancer Medicine".

Not surprisingly, after this apalling refusal to adopt the wishes of the members and censors, many members quickly resigned from ACSCM, including me.

I can no longer be associated in any way with ACSCM or its current Diretcors whilst this policy of openly allowing industry manipulations, ignoring members wishes and this refusal to behave in any way like a medical College remains the case.

Anthony Dixon

The ten resolutions put to the March 2011 extraordinary general meeting: