Regulating doctors, ensuring good medical practice

General Medical Council publishes Fitness to Practise statistics for 2009

Press Release

20 May 2010

The General Medical Council’s annual report on the number of complaints received about doctors and how those complaints are dealt with at each stage of the fitness to practise procedures has been published.

For the first time, the report for 2009 is supplemented by a series of fact sheets on key themes including ethnicity, gender, time since qualification, area of practice and recorded allegations. The report and fact sheets are available on the GMC website.

The report highlights a number of key facts:

• 270 Fitness to Practise Panel hearings took place in 2009 compared with 204 in 2008. It is likely that the increase in cases is linked to an increase in the number of enquiries made from the NHS, police and other public authorities, which has risen significantly since 2006. Referrals from these groups are likely to be more serious and therefore more likely to progress through to a public hearing.

• 68 doctors were erased from the Medical Register at a Fitness to Practise panel hearing in 2009 compared to 42 in 2008. A further 15 doctors were erased at Fitness to Practise review hearings meaning that a total of 85 doctors were erased from the Medical Register in 2009.

• The most common allegation resulting in erasure from the register in 2009 related to improper relationships with patients – 15 cases in total.

• The most common hearing outcome was suspension – 77 doctors were suspended in 2009.

Paul Philip, Director of Standards and Fitness to Practise, said:

“We are seeing an increasing number of referrals to our fitness to practise procedures from employers and other public authorities like the police but the reasons for this are not entirely clear. What is clear is that although there has been an increase in the number of cases the overall numbers represent a very small proportion of the 230,000 registered doctors in the UK.”

For a copy of the 2009 Fitness to Practise Statistics and the supplementary fact sheets, please visit the 2009 Annual Statistics page.