Consultant who claimed money for work he didn’t do gets 12 month suspension

A consultant anaesthetist who dishonestly added his name to operation charge sheets so as to collect pay he had not earned has been suspended from the UK medical register for 12 months.

Pandeshwar Gururaj, who qualified in India in 1986, was a consultant anaesthetist at NHS Grampian but also practised at the private BMI Healthcare Albyn Hospital. There, in February 2018, a senior theatre practitioner saw him writing on charge sheets in theatre. Asked what he was doing, he replied that he was “sending the charge sheets to recovery.”

The handling of these documents was not his job, and when the theatre practitioner looked at them later she saw that his name had been added for a procedure he had not attended. She alerted her superiors.

Gururaj …