CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF GMC ANNUAL SALARY £255,000 - THE COST OF REGULATION?
Let's transform practicing medicine from the current GMC nightmare to the honour and privilege it should be
Sign The NEW Petition on Houses of Parliament Website
At 10,000 signatures, government will respond to this petition.... At 100,000 signatures, this petition will be considered for debate in Parliament
We believe the General Medical Council (GMC) is not fit for purpose. For example, concerns have been expressed about racial bias, and we conclude from accumulating evidence that, for various reasons, it has now forever lost the profession’s trust and respect. The regulation of the medical profession needs to be conducted by a distinctly different system, which is more consistent and practical, so retaining the confidence of the profession and patients.
SIGN THE NEW PETITION HERE:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/629226
Petition
Create a new regulator of doctors to replace the General Medical Council (GMC) The General Medical Council (GMC) needs to be replaced by a new, fully accountable body, with transparent, constructive and competent practices and policies. It’s time to establish a different organisation, that can truly, yet efficiently, represent the needs of patients and doctors.
SIGN THE NEW PETITION HERE:
Sign The Petition TO GET RID OF CHARLIE MASSEY CEO OF GMC
Stop the GMC Persecuting Doctors and Failing Patients ANOTHER NEW PETITION
About Us
We aim to oppose the utterly dysfunctional General Medical Council (GMC), ensuring that it ceases to regulate doctors in the UK. We endeavour to support doctors and patients trapped in the web of GMC malfunction and deceit.
We seek to gather stories and to publicise the frequent gross injustices perpetrated by the GMC against doctors and patients. We strategise on how to oppose and dismantle the GMC. We have started a nationwide petition calling for the resignation of the GMC Council.
We believe that the General Medical Council of the UK (GMC) is not fit for purpose and should be disbanded. We are campaigning to produce this outcome. Come and join us.
Charlie is a career civil servant - so what qualifies him to regulate doctors?
https://www.gov.uk/government/people/charlie-massey
Charlie Massey has worked in a variety of roles across government, including:
- Director General for Acute Care and Workforce July 2016 to October 2016
- Director General for Strategy and External Relations at the Department of Health
- Account Director for Ageing Society and State Pensions at the Department for Work and Pensions
- leading reviews on childcare and drugs in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
- leading work on Royal Mail and the future of the Post Office network at HM Treasury
- working on pension protection at the Department for Work and Pensions
https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5223/rr-7
GMC to push for erasure of paediatrician convicted of manslaughter
BMJ 2017; 359 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j5223 (Published 09 November 2017) Cite this as: BMJ 2017;359:j5223
Rapid Response:
The GMC demonstrates again that it is not fit for purpose
Many of us have looked on in disbelief at the pursuit by the GMC of the unfortunate Dr Bawa-Garba, by all accounts a conscientious doctor, who along with her patient was the victim of a series of circumstances that were more a reflection of the perilous state of a health service buckling under pressure than her own professional competence. Apart from those employed by the GMC, it is difficult to see who benefits from this process. Certainly not the public or the demoralised and hard-working junior doctors who find themselves in similar dilemmas every day. This serves no purpose other than to demonstrate how out of touch the GMC is with the reality of what is happening in the NHS on a daily basis.
Whether sacrificing doctors on the altar of professional regulation or depleting the medical workforce by driving people from the profession through the excessive requirements of appraisal and revalidation, the GMC has demonstrated yet again that it is simply not fit for purpose as a body committed to promoting a safe and effective health service to meet the needs of our population.
11 November 2017
JXXXXXXX D SXXXX
General Practitoner
Kingstone Surgery, Hereford, HR2 9HN
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-petty-cruelty-of-the-gmc/
The petty cruelty of the GMC
From magazine issue: 20 August 2022
Doctors make mistakes. We mess up, have lapses in judgment, do stupid or downright wrong things. Some break the law, some violate trust. Patients place their wellbeing, and sometimes their lives, in our hands. So it’s only right that we are held to account. All good doctors want scrutiny.
Our regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), is supposed to be there to uphold the standards of the medical profession. It’s meant to help maintain the trust that the public places in us. This, of course, gives it an extraordinary amount of power: it can take away livelihoods.
But the GMC has lost our trust. Many doctors feel that the organisation is now out of control, hellbent on pursuing petty indiscretions above all else. Increasingly, it looks like a vindictive, sclerotic and overly bureaucratic embarrassment that assumes a degree of guilt from the start and aggressively pursues doctors as a result. After a number of appallingly misguided cases, the doctor’s union, the British Medical Association (BMA), has called for a complete overhaul of how the GMC operates.
The impact of a GMC investigation, which is often deeply adversarial, cannot be overestimated. Decisions can take months, sometimes years, meaning that doctors are left in limbo for significant periods of time, frequently over bewildering, vexatious or inappropriate referrals.
Most doctors who have been referred talk about the tremendous toll an investigation takes on their mental health. In fact, I know this from personal experience: I was referred by a patient who made an incredibly serious allegation that I had assaulted them while assessing them in A&E. Despite two police officers being present throughout the assessment, and two other members of staff also accompanying me – and there being CCTV of the entire encounter which showed I didn’t even touch the patient, let alone assault them – the process took 11 months.
During that time I felt a cloud was constantly hanging over me. My sleep suffered and I lost so much weight that colleagues thought I was ill. A survey by the Medical Protection Society highlighted that 72 per cent of respondents felt their GMC investigation had a detrimental impact on their mental and/or physical health and, tragically, between January 2018 and December 2020, 29 doctors died while under investigation or being monitored. Five of these deaths were confirmed as suicides.
The BMA’s call for a full review of the GMC follows a recent case which attracted the ire of virtually the entire medical profession. Dr Manjula Arora, a Manchester GP who trained in India before moving to the UK in the early 1990s, was referred to the GMC over ‘dishonesty’ relating to a laptop. The incident in question took place in 2019 and 2020 while she was working for Mastercall, which provided a clinical assessment service for the North West Ambulance Service.
Dr Arora had emailed her medical director to ask about getting a new work laptop and had been told that, while none was currently available: ‘I will note your interest when the next rollout happens.’ She later told the IT department over the phone that she had been ‘promised’ a laptop by the medical director. The GMC representative, Carl Hargan, accused her of lying about being promised one because the medical director’s email was ‘entirely unambiguous’.
Because of this misunderstanding, Dr Arora had ‘brought the medical profession into disrepute’. The tribunal (at which the GMC is represented against doctors by a team of its own lawyers) concluded that although ‘Arora had not set out to be dishonest, and that she had not set out to mislead IT… she had exaggerated her position in her use of one inappropriate word’. The entire case, therefore, rested on the use of the word ‘promised’ and it was deemed she had been dishonest. After a nine-day trial, she was suspended for a month.
Increasingly, the GMC looks like a vindictive, sclerotic and overly bureaucratic embarrassment
In an editorial earlier this year, the doctor’s in-house journal, the BMJ, branded the case an ‘embarrassment’ for the GMC, one that had been pursued ‘without an ounce of compassion’. It argued that the organisation has lost all sense of perspective. After a backlash, the GMC said it would not challenge Dr Arora’s appeal and called for her suspension to be dropped by the High Court. But many doctors have seen this as yet one more example of the GMC fundamentally failing to assess what is and what isn’t an appropriate referral.
Four years ago the profession was profoundly shocked by the case of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, a junior doctor working in paediatrics, who was struck off the medical register after the death of a six-year-old boy. A tribunal had originally recommended that she be suspended for a year but the GMC appealed the decision and she was struck off. The case later went to the Court of Appeal and she was reinstated. That the junior doctor should have been held accountable and lose her livelihood in this way was awful; she was made a scapegoat.
Few others were blamed. The consultant in charge on the day, and who was medically responsible for the young boy’s care, received no formal consequences. The case was complex but there was a widespread sense that the GMC had failed to take into account the extenuating circumstances of the case: that the pursued doctor was the most junior member of medical staff; that she had just returned from an extended maternity leave; that three medical colleagues were absent for much of her shift; that she had had no break; that there had been an IT failure at a crucial moment; and that the issue was related to safety in the NHS, not the failure of a single junior doctor.
The strength of feeling about the case was unprecedented. A BMJ-backed study looking into its impact summarised the concern: ‘Many doctors felt that a distinction should be drawn between unintentional error and egregious violations, with an onus on systems as opposed to individuals, and that moral intention, as opposed to clinical outcome, should influence decisions on doctors’ culpability in cases of harm to patients.’
It was argued that the GMC’s approach led to a culture of blaming individuals without judging the system they are part of. Elsewhere, there were concerns that Bawa-Garba had been unfairly pursued and if she had been white (she is black, from Nigeria) the results would have been different.
Certainly the official statistics appear to suggest that something is going on. The GMC itself notes that doctors from ethnic minorities are twice as likely as white doctors to be referred by their employers for fitness-to-practice concerns, while the referral rate for doctors who qualified outside the UK is three times higher than that for British doctors. Indeed, the racial bias of the GMC is one of the main issues that the BMA have raised in their complaint.
In another troubling case which caused widespread anger, a consultant urologist, Omer Karim, faced ‘years of turmoil’ after being racially discriminated against by the GMC. He had been referred to the organisation by the trust he worked for after he blew the whistle on bullying, discrimination and poor practice. He underwent a fitness-to-practice investigation by the GMC that lasted more than four years and in the end was found to have done nothing wrong. But in the meantime Mr Karim, a leading authority on robotic surgery in kidney and prostate cancer, lost his private practice. He felt he had no choice but to leave the trust too, after a settlement that enabled him to work elsewhere in the NHS. He also sold his family home of 20 years and, in order to help with costs, his daughter left her private school.
In 2018 he brought claims against the GMC and it was found the GMC was ‘looking for material to support allegations against Mr Karim, rather than fairly assessing matters presented’. Here was a body pursuing a case to make a point and avoid embarrassment for an NHS trust. The case also showed once again how GMC investigations can take years, leaving doctors – their lives and their livelihoods – hanging in the balance.
The BMA has argued that the GMC is imposing fitness-to-practise sanctions ‘on vulnerable doctors in order to send a message to the wider medical profession’. Far from protecting the public and upholding standards, the GMC appears to be increasingly damaging workforce morale. Doctors now doubt that if they are referred they will be treated in a just and consistent manner.
We no longer trust that the GMC will treat us fairly and protect us from malicious or false accusations. And as any good doctor will tell you, once trust is lost, it’s incredibly hard to win back.
WRITTEN BY
Max PembertonMax Pemberton is a practising doctor and a columnist for the Daily Mail.
How the GMC kills doctors
Psychiatrist died by suicide four days after learning of GMC investigation
BMJ 2022; 378 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o2328 (Published 27 September 2022) Cite this as: BMJ 2022;378:o2328
- Clare Dyer
https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o2328
A psychiatrist has died by suicide after he was notified that he was being investigated by the General Medical Council over a complaint against him.
Michael McPhillips, who had a private practice in west London, feared a public hearing, the inquest into his death was told. He left six suicide notes for family and friends, in one of which he wrote, “Dead people can’t be put on trial so the obvious solution is for me not to be alive.”
West London assistant coroner Anton van Dellen recorded a conclusion of suicide, adding, “I have no hesitation in concluding that the information in the content of the communication from the GMC did contribute to Dr McPhillips’s state of mind and therefore contributed to his death.”
Last March, four days after receiving an email from the GMC setting out the complaint, McPhillips phoned police to tell them where he planned to kill himself so they could find him “before a member of the public did.” Police arrived within 20 minutes and found him next to a bridge near his home. A father of two married to a psychiatric nurse, he died in hospital three days later aged 59. He had searched the internet for suicide methods the day he received the email from the GMC, the inquest heard.
The GMC has reformed its procedures to try to make them more sensitive and has committed to publishing an annual report on the cause of death of doctors who die while under investigation or during monitoring. The first report, published last March, revealed that of 29 doctors who died between 2018 and 2020 while going through investigation or monitoring by the regulator, five died by suicide.
The GMC’s decision to use more sensitive language in communications and lay more emphasis on support services available to doctors followed an independent report into 28 cases from 2005 to 2013 in which doctors had killed themselves during regulatory procedures.1 Among the reforms, the GMC has commissioned the BMA’s wellbeing support service to offer every doctor under investigation free and confidential emotional support from a fellow doctor.
Jenny Vaughan, spokesperson for the campaigning group the Doctors’ Association UK, told the inquest in a statement, “We do have a great deal of concern about the number of suicides. It is our shared experience that doctors under investigation by the GMC often feel they are treated as guilty until proven innocent.”
Recording the conclusion of suicide, the coroner said McPhillips was “very much loved by his family” and “very well respected” as a psychiatrist. “He had a glittering career, studying medicine at Cambridge University and then starting up his eventually extremely successful private practice in London.”
Anthony Omo, the GMC’s general counsel and director of fitness to practise, said in a statement, “Where a doctor dies while under investigation, we undertake a review to ensure we understand and learn any lessons. We continue to listen to feedback and recommendations on ways further to improve our processes and show compassion for those involved in investigations. Where improvements can be made, we move with pace to implement them.”
References
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- Dyer C
- . GMC promises more compassionate approach to doctors under investigation. BMJ2015;351:h6717. doi:10.1136/bmj.h6717 pmid:26656147FREE Full TextGoogle Scholar
Leading psychiatrist who helped Frankie Bridge back from the brink after she suffered breakdown dies in suspected suicide
- Dr Mike McPhillips, 59, called police before he attempted to take his own life
- After emergency services found the psychotherapist he was taken to hospital
- He died three days later after doctors administered emergency treatment
- Dr McPhillips was credited with saving the life of singer Frankie Bridge by the star who was treated by the doctor in 2011
By DAVID PILDITCH FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 21:25, 30 March 2022 | UPDATED: 01:05, 31 March 2022
A leading psychiatrist who helped the rich and famous battle mental health issues died after attempting to take his own life, MailOnline understands.
Dr Mike McPhillips, 59, made a despairing call to police telling them he intended to harm himself.
Officers raced to the scene in south West London along with paramedics and lifeboat crews.
Dr McPhillips was given emergency treatment after being found with serious injuries but died three days later in hospital
Dr McPhillips was given emergency treatment after being found with serious injuries but died three days later in hospital.
The married father-of-two was credited by pop star Frankie Bridge, 33, with helping to pull her back from the brink after she suffered a breakdown during her time with chart-topping girl group The Saturdays.
In September 2011 Frankie - who is married to former England footballer Wayne Bridge - was admitted to the private psychiatric hospital where Dr McPhillips was a consultant.
He went on to work with Frankie when she wrote a candid book about her ongoing struggles called Open: Why Asking For Help Can Save Your Life.
Frankie - who is now an ambassador for mental health charity Mind - declined to comment about the tragedy which happened in the early hours of March 14.
The scene was cordoned off after police arrived at the scene at around 3.30am.
The Metropolitan Police later confirmed Mr McPhillips’ death was not being treated as suspicious.
A spokesperson said: ‘In the early hours of Monday March 14, police received a call from a man who suggested he intended to harm himself.
‘Officers attended, along with London Ambulance Service and the RNLI, and found a man, aged in his 50s, with serious injuries.
‘He was taken to a central London hospital where, sadly, he died on Thursday March 17.
‘His next of kin have been informed.
’The death is not being treated as suspicious and a report will be prepared for the coroner.’
An inquest into Dr McPhillips’ death is due to be opened at West London Coroner’s Court on April 7.
Cambridge educated Dr McPhillips began practicing in 1993 and went on to run his own private consultancy in the desirable Sloane Square area of London with his wife Rebecca charging fees of up to £600 an hour.
Rebecca was too upset to talk about the tragedy at the family’s £3million home in Chiswick, a short walk from the River Thames where the tragedy happened.
A woman relative at the property said: ‘We’re all absolutely traumatised.
‘It’s devastating for everybody - the children are upstairs.’
In September 2011, Frankie Bridge was admitted to the private psychiatric hospital where Dr McPhillips was a consultant
Asked about the events surrounding Dr McPhillips’ death, the relative said: ‘I can’t say anything about the circumstances.’
Along with specialising in a range of mental health disorders, Dr McPhillips was a leading expert in drugs, alcohol and gambling addictions.
Dr Mike McPhillips worked as the lead clinician at the addictions unit at the Priory Hospital in London between 2003 and 2007.
He worked as a visiting consultant at the private Nightingale Hospital since 2009.
Dr McPhillips was a witness at the inquest into the death of Cecil Parkinson’s daughter Mary who took her own life two days after she was discharged from the hospital.
It was there that Frankie was admitted when her world collapsed around her at the height of her fame.
In her book described the role Dr McPhillips played in her recovery along with psychologist Mal Khan after she hit ‘hard sharp rock bottom at what was supposed to be the happiest time of my life’.
She said the pair ‘have helped me back onto the path of better health by giving me the tools and knowledge I need to better understand, manage and accept my illness’.
Dr McPhillips wrote: ‘We badly need people like Frankie to help us destigmatize mental illness and to show that people who suffer from it are nevertheless hardworking and highly successful.
‘In choosing to go public with this book, Frankie is making a brave step on both a personal and professional level'.
For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org
About Us
Our Mission
“The most important words a man can say are, “I will do better.” These are not the most important words any man can say. I am a man, and they are what I needed to say.
The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says “journey before destination.” Some may call it a simple platitude, but it is far more. A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us. But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.
To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.”
Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer
Quoted in
'Timing the senses and sensing the time: Individual differences in subjective duration', by B. J. Fenner: A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Psychology University of Essex, June 2019