Judge quashes junior doctor’s erasure for “failure of fairness”

A trainee doctor who was ordered to be struck off the UK medical register has had the sanction quashed after a High Court judge found that the tribunal that took the decision made “a serious error of principle and procedure leading to a failure of fairness.”1

A medical practitioners tribunal decided to remove Raisah Sawati from the register last August after finding her guilty of three instances of dishonesty and of leaving her post for about two hours without permission to lie down when she was feeling ill. The Doctors Association UK supported her appeal, which was funded by both the Medical Defence Union and the Medical Protection Society.

In her first community placement, the tribunal decided, she had retrospectively altered a record to suggest that she had discussed the patient’s respiratory symptoms …