A professor sacked after an investigation found he committed multiple breaches of research ethics rules, including failing to properly obtain patient consent before using their tissue samples, has failed in his bid to challenge his dismissal before a Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission.
What the Commission decided
Dr Pradeep Tanwar, a professor and director of a gynaecological disease research centre at the University of Newcastle, was dismissed after an investigation panel found he had committed eight serious and two minor breaches of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. The breaches centred on failures to ensure patients gave informed, written consent before their tissue samples were collected and used, including for experiments transplanting human tissue onto mice.
A Deputy President at first instance found there was a valid reason for the dismissal and that the university had given Dr Tanwar a fair process. The Full Bench, comprising a Vice President and two Deputy Presidents, was asked to overturn that finding on six separate grounds, including that the conclusion was legally unreasonable, rested on factual errors, and failed to properly weigh the multi-institutional nature of the research.
The Full Bench rejected every ground. It found the Deputy President was entitled to conclude that Dr Tanwar's conduct was serious enough to destroy trust and confidence in him as a senior academic, even though patients had given some form of consent and no patient was harmed. It held that, as the researcher with ultimate responsibility for the projects, Dr Tanwar needed systems in place to confirm written consent had actually been obtained, and that relying on verbal assurances from individual clinicians was not enough.
The Full Bench also declined an unusual late application by Dr Tanwar to reopen his case and tender a letter suggesting tissue samples had not yet been destroyed. It found that evidence would not have changed the outcome, since the samples could not lawfully be used for research regardless of whether they still existed.
What was actually in dispute
Dr Tanwar argued his conduct amounted to a documentation failure rather than a true consent failure, pointing out that clinicians, not him, were responsible for speaking with patients directly. He argued the consequences that flowed from his conduct, including the closure of his research centre and the loss of millions in funding, were really caused by discretionary decisions of outside bodies like the local health district and a corporate research partner, not by anything he did himself.
The university maintained that Dr Tanwar, as the senior academic ultimately responsible for the research, could not escape accountability for failing to build systems that verified consent had genuinely been given. The Full Bench agreed, finding it was open to the Deputy President to treat the destruction of tissue samples and the unravelling of the research centre as consequences flowing directly from Dr Tanwar's own breaches.
A further dispute concerned whether the Deputy President had properly weighed evidence that governance failures of this kind are common in multi-site medical research. The Full Bench found this evidence had been considered but did not outweigh the seriousness of the breaches found against Dr Tanwar personally.
What this means
The decision turned on the Commission's settled approach to assessing valid reasons for dismissal and the high bar for overturning a first-instance finding on appeal. Because the Deputy President's findings were open on the evidence, the Full Bench found no arguable case of appealable error and refused permission to appeal. The case is a reminder that appeals under the Fair Work Commission's unfair dismissal process succeed only where a genuine legal or factual error can be shown, not merely because a different view might have been reached.