Former BMA chairman fails to have most charges against him dropped

The previous chairman of the BMA, Jim Johnson, has failed in an application to have thrown out many of the charges of misconduct and deficient professional performance that he faces at the General Medical Council.

His counsel Martin Forde QC submitted that for 27 paragraphs of the charges there was insufficient evidence of fault or lack of evidence to support a finding of impairment.

But the GMC’s fitness to practise panel held that it was too soon to consider impairment and that for almost all the alleged failings on which submissions were made the evidence was sufficient to support a finding of fault.

Mr Johnson, a former consultant surgeon with North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust, faces charges over alleged flaws in his treatment of 14 patients. When the case opened in September Andrew Colman, counsel for the GMC, told the panel that the surgeon had left a bulldog clip in a patient, shouted at staff, and behaved like “a caricature of surgical arrogance.”

Mr Colman said that Mr Johnson’s role in representing the medical profession had led to “conflicting pressures of time” as he travelled to the BMA in London while working in two hospitals in Halton and Warrington.

His techniques became “outdated” and he began “over-operating,” carrying out amputations when less dramatic operations would have been more appropriate, Mr Colman alleged. He is also accused of failing to attend multidisciplinary team meetings, failing to explain the risks and benefits of treatment to patients, and failing to involve himself in patients’ postoperative care.

Mr Johnson succeeded in having charges dropped that he performed an elective abdominal aorta repair without a complete preoperative assessment, including Doppler sonography and a full record of leg and pedal pulses. The panel said that it had not been provided with the preoperative assessment in that case by the GMC and that Mr Johnson could not be held responsible in the absence of that document.

The panel also agreed to amend a charge of failing to arrange angioplasty in preference to bypass surgery to one of failing to “consider” angioplasty. But on all the other charges on which the defence had made submissions the application failed.

Rejecting a submission that the charge of failing to attend a multidisciplinary team meeting before performing an aortobifemoral graft should be dropped, the panel’s chairman, Andrew Popat, said, “The panel has noted that the Tuesday MDT [multidisciplinary team] meetings conflicted with Mr Johnson’s British Medical Association commitments.”

A submission that a charge of performing that operation when it was not surgically indicated should be dropped also failed. The panel noted that the GMC’s expert said in his evidence, “I think it was putting a patient at risk of a very major procedure, and the mortality from this is the same as the mortality, or near enough, from aortic aneurysm repair, in the order of anywhere between 4% and 6%, and as it turned out the patient was in the intensive care unit for a long time. That is somewhat indicative of how big this procedure was and what I would not know is how much benefit was derived from it.”