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GMC Back In The Dock The General Medical council has today demonstrated, yet again, that it is incapable of adequately carrying out its statutory duty to regulate the medical profession. In considering a complaint against Professor Rod Griffiths, former Regional Director of Public Health in the West Midlands, the GMC’s case examiners acknowledged that Professor Griffiths’ behaviour had been inappropriate in several ways. They said: “As an experienced practitioner, Professor Griffiths will be aware of the guidance in paragraph 47 of the GMC publication Good Medical Practice. In future he will wish to ensure that comments about colleagues are not misinterpreted as unfounded criticism.” “It is accepted that the specific case of Mrs EP may have involved a standard of care that was sub-optimal, as Dr Pal has alleged. Professor Griffiths’ conclusion that there was no evidence of lack of medical care for patients (including Mrs EP) is not supported by an examination of Mrs EP’s medical records, nor by the “Report of the extended investigation into the allegations made by Dr R Pal in November 1998” conducted by North Staffordshire NHS Trust. The Case Examiners accept, therefore, that Professor Griffiths’ view about the care provided to Mrs EP was inaccurate.” “Dr Pal had to leave a critically ill patient to go to another ward in order to find a drip set (a means of administering intravenous fluids). That this is unsatisfactory is not disputed. The letter of 17/1/05 from his [Professor Griffiths’] representative to the GMC responding to the allegations stated: “An alternative available to the complainant was to call a crash team herself and not leave the patient. The crash team would have had a drip set and would have provided more experience” The statement is inaccurate and, so, misleading. It is noted that the statement was written in response to the options identified by Dr Pal when she said “I was obliged to leave a medically untrained care assistant in charge of a seriously ill and rapidly deteriorating patient with instructions to summon a cardiac arrest team in the event that the patient’s condition became worse before I could return with the equipment.” Crash teams at North Staffordshire NHS Trust did not routinely carry drip sets. It is acknowledged that it would have been inappropriate for Dr Pal to call the team for a patient who did not require immediate resuscitation.” However, for each and every aspect of the complaint against Professor Griffiths, including those points outlined above in which his conduct was found to be indisputably lacking, the GMC unhesitatingly declared that there was no prospect of obtaining evidence to demonstrate that his fitness to practise was impaired to an extent that warranted action on his registration. Click here to read their findings. Clearly, the case examiners have approached this matter in a disturbingly short-sighted, if not wilfully unobservant, manner. Take the case of Mrs EP as an example; it is no great leap of logic to assume that if, as the GMC have been forced to admit, Professor Griffiths’ findings were inaccurate with respect to her treatment, it is at least possible that his findings were similarly bogus for other patients. Yet, the GMC’s case examiners seem eager to single out Mrs EP as an aberrant example – an exception that proves the rule, so to speak. Professor Griffiths originally told the GMC that there was no – NO – evidence of a lack of medical care for patients. He did not say “no evidence except for Mrs EP”. He said “No evidence”. Such a sweeping statement must, by definition, be either accurate or inaccurate in its entirety. In this case it was demonstrably inaccurate, and this inaccuracy cannot be excused by identifying exceptions after the fact. The complaint against Professor Griffiths, which ran to approximately 1000 pages of documentation - including records obtained from the Department of Health which appeared to contradict submissions made to the GMC by DoH lawyers on his behalf – alleged that he had set out to discredit Dr Pal’s concerns regarding poor standards of care at North Staffordshire NHS Trust. It was also alleged that he had misled the GMC as to the true state of affairs at the Trust and that, in his responses to these (and other) allegations, he had again attempted to mislead the GMC. Click here to read the full extent of the allegations, as formalised by the GMC. Interestingly, Professor Griffiths, whose research techniques in relation to the Griffiths Inquiry were heavily criticised in the British Medical Journal, is currently retained by the GMC as part of their Education Committee (Click here to read). He will no doubt be delighted to learn that his GMC colleagues have seen fit to dismiss the extensively documented complaint against. Unfortunately, his glee is likely to be extremely short-lived. So complex is this case, and so detailed the documentation, that it is extremely difficult to see how the GMC’s case examiners could realistically have dismissed the matter out of hand rather than subjecting it to the rigours of a full hearing. They have done so, however, and it is our understanding that this further demonstration of the GMC’s mind boggling incompetence will now be subjected to judicial review. Watch this space.
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