Doctors who miss tribunals risk being struck off, warns judge

The General Medical Council (GMC) should warn doctors facing regulatory hearings that they are “courting removal” from the medical register if they do not turn up at the tribunal, a High Court judge has urged.1

Mr Justice Kerr made the call in a judgment dismissing Abayomi Sanusi’s appeal from a decision by a medical practitioners tribunal to strike him off the register.

In November 2017 the tribunal found that Sanusi, a surgical registrar, who was not represented and did not appear at the hearing but put in written submissions, had failed to comply with junior doctors’ requests to examine three deteriorating patients.2 It also concluded that he had lied in a job interview.

Kerr said, “This was another case in which a professional, facing serious disciplinary charges including a charge …