Doctors' fitness to practise statistics and reports

Please note: the information on this page relates solely to doctors and does not include any data on physician associates or anaesthesia associates. This will be added in the future.

Doctors' fitness to practise annual statistics

These reports show the volume and outcome of complaints about doctors. 

Doctors who have died while under investigation or during a period of monitoring

If we need to investigate a doctor’s practice, it can be a difficult time for everyone involved. Over recent years, we’ve introduced wide ranging reforms to reduce the impact and stress of investigations, including specific support for doctors who are in our fitness to practise processes.

As part of this work, we committed to publish the number of doctors who have sadly died while under investigation or during a period of monitoring.

This information is now published annually as part of our fitness to practise statistics. However, to avoid the risk of identifying individual doctors, the data are reported over a rolling three-year period. 

Concerns raised about doctors by secondary care organisations

Our data includes concerns raised about doctors we investigated from 2007 to 2012. It includes concerns raised from:

  • NHS and Health and Social Care trusts in England and Northern Ireland. This includes hospital, mental health and ambulance trusts.
  • NHS area boards in Scotland and local health boards in Wales. These boards are responsible for delivering both primary and secondary care.

It does not include concerns raised about doctors who practise in private healthcare.

Understanding the data

Please note that none of this data includes information about physician associates or anaesthesia associates, it only includes doctors. 

When a concern is raised with us, where possible we record where the incident that led to the concern took place. 

A concern is assigned to a particular trust or board if the incident occurred there, or the doctor was employed there when the incident took place (for example, a criminal conviction). This won’t always be the organisation that currently employs the doctor or that the doctor is connected to for revalidation.

Caution is needed when interpreting the data. The information has been provided in alphabetical order by countries of the UK according to the name of the trust or board and is not ranked by volume of concerns raised. Ranking by volume can be very misleading for the following reasons.

  • The data shows both the number of concerns and the number of doctors raised with us. One doctor may have received more than one concern raised about them.
  • Our data does not take account of the size of the healthcare provider, the number of doctors working there, or the different services they provide. This means a provider may have a high or low number of complaints simply due to its size.
  • Higher numbers of concerns raised could be due to a range of factors unrelated to the standards of medical practice. These include: the effectiveness of the local clinical governance systems; better systems for handling concerns; or a culture where reporting concerns is encouraged.

Compendium of GMC published findings relating to Fitness to practise rates (2022)

Our data compendium is a summary of published GMC findings from 2011 to 2022 about how different factors relate to rates of FTP complaints, investigations and outcomes for doctors. It summarises findings and signposts to the original publications for reference and further reading. 

View the Compendium of GMC published findings relating to Fitness to Practise rates