Doctor who received £1.2m from patient’s estate is struck off

A psychiatrist who accepted £1.2m (€1.4m; $1.9m) from the estate of a vulnerable patient has been struck off by the General Medical Council for behaviour that “would appal other medical practitioners and shake the confidence of the public in the profession.”

Peter Rowan, 62, a private practitioner in Harley Street, central London, prescribed “excessive amounts” of benzodiazepines to Patricia May, a former actor who had had anorexia for more than 30 years when she died, aged 66, in 2003 after a fall at her home.

A GMC fitness to practise panel found that his prescribing practices risked her becoming dependent on the treatment and becoming vulnerable to dizziness, which could cause falls and fractures, given that she had osteoporosis. Dr Rowan is not blamed for her death, which an inquest found was caused by respiratory disease.

A former specialist in eating disorders at the private Priory Clinic, Dr Rowan was said to have had a “blurred and secretive” relationship with the patient, from whom he also accepted gifts totalling £150 000 while she was alive.

He complied with her wish that he should not communicate with her GP or clinicians treating her for the respiratory disease about the treatment he was giving her, regarding it as an “embargo.” As a result she was “over-medicated,” he risked compromising the management of her respiratory illness, and he was not in a position to prescribe safely, the panel held.

When the hearing opened last May, Andrew Hurst, for the GMC, told the panel that Ms May was “very fond” of Dr Rowan, who had been treating her since 1987, and “saw him as a friend and wanted to reward him.” But the psychiatrist “lost sight of professional boundaries, maintaining dual roles of treating doctor and friend, a role that had become blurred and secretive. He may have given some comfort to a vulnerable patient, and he will of course have become better off personally, but he failed her.”

The panel’s chairwoman, Mary Clark-Glass, said that Dr Rowan had since improved his communication and record keeping to a limited degree but added, “This cannot take away from your failures in so many other core areas. These are of course your dangerous prescribing, your failings in the treatment of a vulnerable patient, your serious breach of the doctor-patient relationship by your acceptance of extraordinarily large gifts, and your adherence to what you mistakenly called an embargo.

“All these put the patient at risk and involved a fundamental breach of the trust that patients are entitled to place in doctors. The panel considers that your behaviour in these areas is not remediable. The public’s confidence in engaging with doctors will be undermined if there is a sense that such misconduct may be engaged in with impunity.”