PACA accuses GMC chief executive of misleading listeners
In an interview during Saturday’s edition of the Today programme on Radio 4 (8th December 2007), Mr. Finlay Scott, Chief Executive of the General Medical Council, gave out false information about the number of doctors who have been brought before the GMC in connection with child protection cases.
Mr Scott told the interviewer, John Humphrys, that PACA had ”unfortunately created the impression that the GMC unfairly persecutes paediatricians involved in child protection work and that’s simply not borne out by the facts”.
He added: “Since I think 2004, during which time we’ve probably had five or six hundred cases before Fitness to Practise panels, only two could reasonably be said to have had any connection with child protection work.”
This is not true. PACA knows of at least five doctors who have been brought before the GMC since 2004 on charges relating to their actions in child protection cases. These are Professors Meadow and Southall and Drs Lazaro, Spender and Paterson. PACA challenges Mr Scott to issue a statement disclosing the true figure. Mr Scott also knows that three of these 5 cases involve world leaders in child protection and that through the high profile media activities that accompanied the fitness to practice hearings that most paediatricians who have admired and been led by these doctors will have been severely discouraged and worried by the very fact that they reached full hearings let alone by the erasure from the register that followed for Professors Meadow and Southall
It is also disingenuous of Mr Scott to create the impression that paediatricians’ concerns are based solely on the number of complaints that have reached the panel stage. He knows full well that it was the GMC’s decision not only to bring the recently heard charges against David Southall but to produce such a perverse finding with draconian sanctions that has undermined the confidence of doctors working in child protection.
Child-protection work invariably means raising uncomfortable suspicions about parents. Some of these suspicions will prove well founded, some will not. To ensure doctors will not hesitate to raise such concerns, providing they have raised them in good faith they are immune to legal action taken by aggrieved parents. The GMC has unilaterally rendered this immunity meaningless by replacing the threat of legal action with the even greater threat of the loss of livelihood.
