Hi Stuart,
No, this is a very bad practice!
The dispatcher allow you to serve a very large number of request if the page is cached.
If you need to remove all cache for each author page publish, probably you are working on a full loggedin site which need to have really dynamic information. If you are working on a full loggedin site, probably you need to remove the caching directly from the dispatcher configuration; even if I can confirm you that also into some loggedin site (e.g. intranet) something could be cached in order to improve performance.
Let us know if you need more info.
Thanks,
Antonio