High Court overturns two GMC judgments and sends them back to be heard by new panels

A GP who was struck off by the General Medical Council for sexual misconduct amounting to “gross violation of the fundamental rules relating to the relationship between doctor and patient” has won a High Court ruling quashing the findings.

Mr Justice Kenneth Parker ruled that the GMC fitness to practise panel in the case of Edouard Yaacoub gave inadequate reasons for deciding that the patient, a 56 year old widow with spastic paraplegia who gave an increasingly lurid account of what had happened to her, was a credible witness.

The inadequacy of the panel’s reasoning for accepting the evidence of the GMC’s main witness as credible is the same basis on which the Court of Appeal quashed the decision to strike the paediatrician David Southall off the medical register. …