Background & Clinical Focus
Dr Basanth Kenchaiah is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (FRANZCP) with an Advanced Certificate in Addiction Psychiatry and more than two decades of clinical experience across public and private settings. His practice sits at the intersection of addiction psychiatry, complex polypharmacy, and general adult psychiatry — some of the most challenging and underserved territory in the field.
His focus on deprescribing grew from working alongside pain specialists and, above all, from listening. Patient after patient arrived carrying medication lists that had grown steadily over years, each drug added with good intentions, few ever removed. Many hadn't meaningfully improved. Some had developed dependence on the very medications prescribed to help them; others had serious side effects going unrecognised, or were being managed with yet more drugs. GPs, pain specialists, and other clinicians were each managing their piece of a deeply complex picture. But care was largely siloed, with stretched public services able to offer little more than a one-off assessment. Too often, nobody was standing back and asking whether the accumulated medication burden itself had become the problem. That question — and the patients caught in the space where no one was asking it — became the defining focus of his work.
Working with these patients — carefully, collaboratively, and without rushing — proved to be the turning point for many. The relational principles of deprescribing mattered enormously: building trust, making decisions together, moving at a pace the patient could manage, and never losing sight of the person behind the prescription list. Progress wasn't always fast. For some, it came in small but meaningful gains over months; for others after years of gradual reduction. But it came. And in those patients where opioid use disorder had taken hold — often quietly, often unrecognised — treating it directly with appropriate opioid pharmacotherapy was frequently the change that made everything else possible.
His practice now brings together addiction psychiatry, complex medication review, and general adult psychiatry — with a particular emphasis on patients where these areas overlap and where standard clinical pathways have fallen short.
Beyond the clinic, Dr Kenchaiah has spent much of his career shaping training standards in his field. He chairs the RANZCP Subcommittee for Advanced Training in Addiction Psychiatry — the bi-national body responsible for setting those standards — and sits on the Executive Committee of the Australian Deprescribing Network (ADeN). He also represents the RANZCP on the Medicinal Cannabis Expert Working Group, Department of Health and Aged Care. Throughout his career he has taught medical students, junior doctors, and specialist trainees, and remains committed to making specialist knowledge more accessible — to patients and the clinicians who support them.
