The AMA forum heard medicos' horror stories about the terrible conditions in detention centres. Credit:photos@smh.com.au Paediatric nurse Alanna Maycock told the meeting she had met a 6-year-old girl on Nauru with "marks around her neck where she had tried to hang herself with fence ties". A boy aged 15 had sewn his lips together. And one woman had been menstruating for two months, using material from her tent to staunch the bleeding because of inadequate access to sanitary items. "There is a dark chilling feeling when you go to Nauru of lawlessness," she told the meeting. "Guards can behave as inappropriately as they wish because there are no repercussions for their actions." The meeting of angry medicos came against the dramatic backdrop of the baby Asha saga, playing out in Brisbane, where staff had refused to discharge a young child receiving treatment for burns because of fears she would be sent back into detention. Professor Owler revealed that he'd texted Opposition Leader Bill Shorten around 7pm on Saturday night, having heard guards might forcibly remove the child from Brisbane's Lady Cilento hospital. Mr Shorten then rang Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and, by Sunday afternoon, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton announced that baby Asha would not be returning to Nauru, but would be released into "community detention".

Mr Dutton insisted that had been the government's plan all along and that activists had "hijacked" the debate around the child. But Professor Owler said there were still concerns for the remaining children on Nauru and another 80 in Australia. He said all Australians should "examine their conscience about what this country is doing to these children – what's being done in their name – and call on our politicians to come up with a better way of responding to this problem." Relations between the AMA and the Department of Immigration and Border Security appear to have hit a new low, with Professor Owler accusing the department of displaying "zealot-like behaviour" on asylum seekers. "I have been yelled at at meetings and people have taken offence to what I have said, that's fine," he said. "But I have never encountered the sort of attitude that does not even seem to understand an alternative point of view, that wants to shut people away, that has been intimidating our own doctors." "When are these people [in the department] going to grow up and stop putting on military uniforms and giving themselves medals?"

He said the department's "ridiculous" insistence on being the arbiter of when asylum seeker patients should be transferred for medical care had been a contributing factor in the death of a 24-year-old [Iranian Hamid Khazaei] held on Manus, who died in 2014 from complications of a leg infection. "That patient should never have died," he said. While some medicos want to boycott the provision of medical services to asylum seekers as a form of protest, Professor Owler said that would close down the little oversight there already was of the detention centres. Professor David Isaacs, a Sydney paediatrician, told the meeting that prolonged involuntary detention "fulfilled the criteria for torture" and drew comparisons with the notorious US prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Ms Maycock said she had been "petrified" for her family in speaking out about conditions on Nauru, but then decided she had no choice.

She had been horrified to find shower blocks without doors at the Nauru detention centre, only "flimsy curtains" for women and children, who had to perform their ablutions in sight of male guards. Professor in Child Health Elizabeth Elliott reported finding 10 mothers with infant children under 24-hour suicide watch when she went to Christmas Island in 2014. Human Rights Commission chief Gillian Triggs and Greens leader Richard Di Natale, a former medico, were among those who attended the AMA forum.