MY CLAIM FOR COMPO.(compensation for listening to hospital patients)

I SUPPOSE YOU COULD say it was a case of being rubbed the wrong way. A Sydney masseuse was recently awarded $26,000 in compensation by a New South Wales court for the depression she claimed she suffered after years of listening to her clients' tales of woe. The gratuitous gossip included claims of domestic violence, adultery and abusive relationships.

Initially, I wondered why she allowed herself to become privy to her clients' personal details. A professional approach would have involved keeping a respectable distance from their personal affairs, simply by politely pointing out that she was neither a counsellor nor a psychologist nor a cop, merely a masseuse hired to relieve aching muscles and tired limbs.

Perhaps it's easier said than done. Old-fashioned concepts of professionalism no longer seem to apply. Mr John Marsden, a leading New South Wales barrister involved in a current defamation case, recently told the Supreme Court, "A lot of my sexual partners have been clients. There is nothing unethical about that. That's what the Law Society rules are." And Mr Marsden was previously the President of the New South Wales Law Society.

Professionals, particularly doctors and psychiatrists, becoming sexually involved with their patients is sadly nothing new any more. The idea of professionals remaining physically and psychologically detached from their clients, patients or charges has taken a bit of a battering.

People involved in vocations which deal with people and their health, welfare and human needs, no longer know where to draw the line, and what is worse, neither do their clients. You might have been trained to respect your clients' right to privacy and uphold the confidentiality of the information they impart, but it's rather difficult if the clients have no respect for their own privacy and decide to treat you as a combination "father confessor", psychoanalyst and life-long intimate friend.

So, while some cynics will see the masseuse's case as nothing but a grab for money, disguised as a "compo claim", I'm beginning to sympathise with her predicament. But whereas she claims she suffered mental anguish in the form of depression upon being the unwilling recipient of intimate information, I'm claiming mental anguish in the form of exasperation.

I AM EMPLOYED as a porter in the radiology department of a large Melbourne public hospital. Our "catchment area" for patients, as health professionals describe it, includes Melbourne's northern and western suburbs. I believe the simile is drawn from rivers flowing into dams, rather than gutters emptying into sewers, but sometimes I wonder.