Male doctors and older doctors are more likely to be referred to the National Clinical Assessment Service and are also more likely to experience exclusion or suspension from work, a statistical review of eight years of casework has found.

The study of concerns relating to the performance of doctors and dentists in the United Kingdom also found that, within the hospital and community care sector, non-white practitioners who qualified outside the UK were more likely to be referred to the service than other groups.

But non-white practitioners who qualified in the UK were no more likely to be referred, suspended, or excluded than the rest of the sample. It was not possible to study any associations between referral rates and ethnicity in …