GP is suspended after tribunal decides erasure would be "disproportionate"

A GP who misled a coroner about his treatment of two patients has been suspended for four months by a medical practitioners tribunal that rejected a request from the General Medical Council to strike him off.

Abubakr Osman, who qualified in Sudan in 2002, was asked by a coroner’s officer in February 2014 to provide records of his last interaction with a patient who had died at home of bleeding from a burst abscess in his groin.

Osman had spoken to the patient while on telephone triage duty three days earlier. After a two minute phone consultation in which the patient mentioned his abscess and said that it was causing pain, Osman had prescribed flucloxacillin. He had not …