You might have read my recent moan about the GMC. I know - easy target and all that.
I guess I was trying to make the basic point that after all these years, all the changes to the way it works, all the year-on-year rises in fees, there still appears to be puzzling inconsistencies in its consideration of a doctor’s fitness to practise.
As was pointed out to me after I’d posted the blog, I wasn’t being particularly fair. I was ignoring the culpability of trusts and the courts in the regulatory process, and I wasn’t comparing like-with-like in the cases I’d highlighted. I accept these points.
But then I read the BMJ, on 20 November, and felt vindicated in my suspicions that GMC decision making can be influenced by the media profile of a case.
Paediatrician Prof David Southall is soon to be up in front of a fitness to practise panel once more as part of long running investigations into his work.
In the post-Shipman era, when all the eyes were on the GMC to prove it was an advocate of patient safety, the investigations into the leading experts of fabricated or induced illness provided an opportunity for the regulator to dispel the perception that it looked after its own.
Both Southall and Roy Meadow were struck off the register for their work on child protection before being re-instated by the courts.
Behind all this there was a vociferous, and well-coordinated media campaign by parental activists, and its influences are still being felt today with the presence (all be it briefly) of chief protagonist Penny Mellor on the GMC’s children protection working group.
Whatever you think of Southall, and his actions concerning Sally and David Clark, he made an incredibly valid point this week at a conference; doctors who have accessed child pornography, and thus been complicit in abuse, have been treated more leniently by the GMC than those who have stridently attempted to protect children.
He cited a number of cases of doctors being simply suspended for downloading kiddie porn prior to a return to work.
Southall is calling for an inquiry into the GMC’s treatment of doctors who work in child protection. I’d go further, and suggest we need an inquiry into the consistency of the regulator’s decision making.
Tags: Child protection, GMC, Southall
Why punish child advocates at all?
As a Consultant Psychiatrist with special interest in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder I have suffered now 11 years of persecution through the General Medical Council following the expression of my opinion that religious uniforms are inappropriate wear in psychiatry where some patients may have suffered abuse by clergy etc. There are now one million raped men by clergy alone world wide and the whole world knows of the various cover ups as well as Catholic church law which dealt with abuse by the use of a little prayer book.
Medical Director who made initial vexations complaints as well as others have all been protected by GMC.
It is important to punish doctors who speak up for children because children are seen there as having no power to do anything. Religious fantasies and power of the organized religion is more important than justice or health in my case.