Letter to the GMC chair regarding Hadiza Bawa-Garba

The following is a letter to the chair of the General Medical Council.

Dear Professor Stephenson,

I write to you about what seems to be a serious misjudgment by the GMC regarding Hadiza Bawa-Garba.1

To set the context for my concerns, I am, among other things, a non-executive director of a major acute hospital trust, president of the charity Healthwatch, which promotes evidence based medicine, and the longest serving member of the Royal College of Physicians’ committee on ethics in medicine.

On all three criteria—management, evidence, and ethics—I fear the GMC has misjudged this case. As a journalist and broadcaster I suspect that one of the factors might have been pressure from the media, and I remind you that newspaper reporters are out to make a story, not nuanced judgments, and their printed …