Report on doctors facing GMC action published

General Medical Council (GMC) decisions about doctors who qualify outside the UK are more likely to have far reaching consequences (high impact decisions), finds research led by King's College London, published in the British Medical Journal today. The authors, Charlotte Humphrey, Professor of Health Care Evaluation from the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing & Midwifery, and Martin C Gulliford, Professor of Public Health, from the Department of Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, from King's, say there is no clear answer why overseas doctors do worse in GMC fitness to practise processes than their UK-trained peers. Humphrey and Gulliford argue that perhaps 'real differences exist in fitness to practise between groups of doctors who are referred to the GMC' or 'that the GMC processes tend to discriminate against certain groups of doctors.' However, the authors stress that their research makes it 'difficult to reach a conclusion that clearly supports either of these potential explanations and both might be valid.' The researchers reviewed the background to 7,526 inquiries to the GMC concerning 6,954 doctors. They assessed how many inquiries were referred for further investigation, how many were investigated and then referred for adjudication, and the number that resulted in doctors being erased or suspended from the medical register. The results show that among the 7,526 inquiries, 4,702 were related to doctors who had qualified in the UK, 624 in the European Union (EU) and 2,190 who had qualified outside the EU.