Ajay Gohil has represented licensing boards for twenty-one years, most of it inside a United States system built around investigations and consent orders. Dr. Katrina Mulherin spent her career on the other side of the border and a different part of the process, working as deputy registrar and administrator of complaints at a small Canadian college with a focus on ethics and education.
In Episode 2 of Board Insights, both join Greg Hirschi, VP of Operations at EBAS, and reach the same conclusion from very different starting points. Real change comes from humane, relationship-driven engagement, and boards still need objective evidence before they can act on it.
Those two ideas depend on each other.
Why the Pairing Matters
A regulatory attorney who worked with the Georgia and Washington, D.C. boards and a former deputy registrar from a Canadian college of pharmacists do not share a playbook. Ajay spent his career on the adversarial side, representing boards through complaints and settlements, while Katrina ran a small regulator where one person carried several roles and remediation was assembled case by case. They watched different parts of the disciplinary process from different seats.
When two people with that little in common reach the same conclusions, the conclusions read as a pattern rather than one practitioner’s preference. The episode gives boards two independent perspectives that happen to converge, which carries more weight than any single view.
Rehabilitation Over Punishment
Rehabilitation over punishment is Ajay’s organizing principle, paired with accountability built through clear, constructive feedback and support. He favors anything that makes the system less adversarial, and in practice that means looking for a resolution before filing a notice of hearing. A case focused on resolution tends to move faster than one driven toward a trial that can run for months or years.
Katrina lands in the same territory from the ethics and education side, and she pushes further. She raises restorative justice and questions whether the inherited disciplinary structure still serves regulators well. Her more immediate suggestion is usable now. When a board writes a decision, it can leave room, even a sentence or two, to point the professional toward the next phase with some hope attached, rather than ending only on the terms of the sanction.
The shared instinct shows up in the words each one chooses. Ajay talks about moving from a punitive, gotcha mindset toward a transparent remediation approach. Katrina cites the Professional Standards Authority in the United Kingdom and its work on kindness in regulation. Neither one treats kindness as a substitute for accountability. The claim they both make is narrower: a process built only to punish rarely produces the outcome a board is after.
Psychological Safety as the Condition for Change
Katrina ties the humane approach to how people actually learn. Meaningful learning is precluded when someone does not feel safe, she explains, so a regulator that expects change has to engender safety alongside the line it draws. She describes remediation as handing control back to a professional who lost it during the complaint process, often by offering a genuine choice among remediation routes instead of a single assigned path.
Ajay frames the same condition in procedural terms, pointing to early intervention and support as what determines whether a licensee accepts responsibility or digs in. Greg adds the view from EBAS’s own caseload, where licensees arrive at very different starting points, some in fear and some in denial, and shared language and a basic sense of safety change what becomes possible from there.
Where Objective Evidence Fits
The humane process is necessary, and on its own it does not give a board something to act on. Both guests describe the gap.
Ajay points to the cases where a structured assessment earns its place. One is the applicant who was disciplined or investigated in another jurisdiction and now seeks a license. Another is the boundaries or sexual misconduct complaint where a board is not ready to discipline but does not feel right closing the file, and where members split on what to do. A third is the case that calls for more than one tool, where a board pairs an intensive boundaries course with an assessment. In each situation, the board needs more than an impression before it acts.
Katrina supplies the contrast that makes the point land. During her years as a regulator she did not have an objective measure like the one EBAS provides, so she relied on a series of well-documented conversations and her own qualitative read of whether a professional was making the connections that mattered. She is direct that this kind of measure was not available to her in that role, and her account shows what a board works without when its evidence stays subjective.
That is where EBAS fits in this conversation. It is not the whole answer, and it does not replace the relationship work both guests describe. It is the objective layer underneath that work, the part that gives a board a defensible basis for the decision it is already trying to make.
Watch the Full Episode
The full conversation runs longer than any recap can, and the back-and-forth between Ajay and Katrina is where the agreement becomes most convincing. Watch the complete Episode 2 to hear both of them work through what changes a professional, and what a board needs to see before it acts.
Join the Conversation
We are continuing the discussion from this episode on LinkedIn. How does your board balance support and accountability in its disciplinary process? Follow EBAS on LinkedIn and let us know
About the guests
Ajay Gohil is a healthcare regulatory attorney who spent twenty-one years representing licensing boards in Georgia and Washington, D.C., and now teaches the boundaries and ethics and professionalism courses at the Professional Boundaries Institute.
Dr. Katrina Mulherin is a former deputy registrar of the New Brunswick College of Pharmacists who works on codes of ethics and remediation program design.
