GMC should not regulate doctors’ private lives, finds poll

The majority of doctors, patients, and the public do not believe that the General Medical Council should regulate doctors’ private lives, a poll on the regulator’s website found.

Nearly all (94%) of the 1167 respondents to the online poll thought that the GMC should not regulate doctors lives outside medicine, whereas only 54 (5%) thought it should, and 13 (1%) weren’t sure.

Respondents expressed concern that regulating doctors’ conduct outside medicine would breach the right of all individuals to a private life and that it had little to do with clinical practice.

“If a doctor’s behaviour is legal and doesn’t affect their clinical practice, it is none of the GMC’s business,” commented one respondent. Another said, “What doctors do in their own time is entirely up to them, so long as it is lawful—they have no less of a right to privacy than any other member of the population.”

But other respondents suggested that how doctors behave outside medicine contributes towards the public’s trust in the profession, whereas some thought that the GMC should step in only when a doctor’s behaviour outside work could affect their clinical performance.

The poll formed part of a review of the GMC’s guidance on professional conduct, Good Medical Practice, last updated in 2006. Good Medical Practice states that a doctor’s conduct “at all times” should justify patients’ trust in the individual doctor and the public’s trust in the profession. The guidance also stipulates that doctors must be honest and trustworthy and should act with integrity.

Last year the GMC investigated 1442 fitness to practise complaints related to probity, which includes behaviour that might undermine a patient’s or the public’s trust in the medical profession.

The rationale for investigating cases that fall in this category is that patients need to trust their doctors absolutely, says the GMC. Patients may not be comfortable being treated by a doctor whose clinical conduct is up to standard but who has a criminal conviction for a violent or sexual offence, for example, or whose conduct they find morally unacceptable, such as one who uses child pornography.

However, doctors are not “plaster saints” of whom no more should be expected in their lives beyond medicine than of anyone else, it adds.

• Hear Niall Dickson, chief executive of the GMC, talk about the GMC’s guidance on regulating doctors’ lives outside medicine in a BMJ podcast at http://podcasts.bmj.com/bmj/2011/09/23/caring-for-the-carers/.