A Wollongong meditation instructor has been permanently banned from providing any health services after "inappropriate physical contact’’ with a young female client.
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The Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) put the ban in force this week after completing a lengthy investigation into Robert Jarvis, who owns and manages Wollongong Wellness Centre with his wife.
It comes after Mr Jarvis confessed in Wollongong Court on June 4 to leading a guided meditation class with a young woman at the centre in April, despite a previous prohibition order banning him from providing any health service.
Mr Jarvis was fined $12,000 and placed on a two-year good behaviour bond as punishment for flouting the ban.
On Thursday, the HCCC released its findings that he had also breached the NSW Code of Conduct for unregistered health practitioners when he "failed to provide a health service in a safe and ethical manner’’.
The investigation found that Mr Jarvis had "engaged in gratuitous, opportunistic and inappropriate physical contact’’ with a 22-year-old university student during a meditation session.
According to the HCCC report, the young woman had booked online to do a meditation class on April 4 and Mr Jarvis continued with the class although she was the only participant.
At the time Mr Jarvis was under a three-year ban - which came into effect in August 2011 - for inappropriately touching a female client back in 2010.
Mr Jarvis ignored that ban when he took the student through a guided meditation in a darkened room with the door shut. During the session he placed his hands on her neck and chin, at one point asking her "Are you scared? Are you frightened now?’’.
The HCCC report states that while he had his hands on the woman’s neck, he was pressing his groin into her body, at the level of her upper back, and swaying from side to side.
"Despite the fact Mr Jarvis ought to have been aware that the young woman found the situation extremely frightening, he maintained physical contact with her for an extended period of time,’’ the report stated.
The HCCC also found that while Mr Jarvis had qualifications in remedial massage, naturopathy, acupuncture and osteopathy – he had no formal training as a meditation instructor.
Further, he had been deregistered as an osteopath in 1993 for five years by the Chiropractors and Osteopaths Tribunal for having sexual relationships with a number of female clients, and had never sought re-registration.
Mr Jarvis owned and operated the Wellness Centre at locations in the Illawarra’s northern suburbs between 2001 and 2011, before opening the centre in central Wollongong in late 2012.
The HCCC ban does not prohibit Mr Jarvis from undertaking "administration functions and tasks’’ at the centre.
Mr Jarvis was contacted by the Mercury on Friday but declined to make a response.