Leading oncologist faces GMC allegations of inappropriate treatment of dying patients

A UK oncologist with a world reputation is facing allegations by the General Medical Council that he provided medication inappropriately in an attempt to keep terminally ill patients alive.

Justin Stebbing, professor of cancer medicine and oncology at Imperial College London, who has a private practice in Harley Street, faces allegations at a medical practitioners tribunal of failing to provide good clinical care to 11 patients between March 2014 and March 2017.

Stebbing, 49, who specialises in immunotherapy for breast, lung, and gastrointestinal cancers, has been consulted by patients from around the world who were determined to extend their lives as long as possible. The allegations, involving privately paying, terminally ill patients, include lack of informed consent, overestimation of the prognosis of treatment, poor judgment on the dosages and timings of treatments, acting outside national guidelines, and failing to take on board the concerns of colleagues.

Among Stebbing’s patients was the New Zealand brewing tycoon Douglas Myers, who consulted him in 2013 after being told he had only weeks to live because his colon cancer had spread. He lived for another four years.

Another patient, the actor Lynda Bellingham, lived for another 15 months after consulting Stebbing about her terminal bowel cancer.

One charge alleges that Stebbing directed the administration of further systemic therapy to a patient who was very frail and incontinent and who had cellulitis and gross lower limb oedema, described by Stebbing as “a very sick man” who was “approaching the end of the road.”

In the case of a patient with lung cancer, he is alleged to have made decisions that were based on an unrealistic prognosis, despite her deteriorating condition, to justify reversing a do not attempt resuscitation order, reversing the previously agreed ceiling of care, and providing her with assisted ventilation.

In another case he is alleged to have signed off a private health insurance application for funding a cancer regimen, stating that a multidisciplinary team meeting had taken place the day before when no such meeting had occurred.

He has interim conditions placed on his practice, pending the outcome of the hearing. These ban him from providing cancer treatment outside documented recommendations from the multidisciplinary team meeting or prescribing anticancer drugs outside their UK licensed indications.

Stebbing was awarded the first National Institute for Health Research’s translational research professorship in oncology and has published over 600 peer reviewed papers. In 2016 he was appointed coeditor in chief of the journal Oncogene.

The journal’s website says, “His focus is on new therapies in cancer, and the systemic management of patients with solid malignancies including a number of new biomarker-based approaches, with an emphasis on circulating tumour cells and cell free DNA.”

The tribunal will hear from seven expert witnesses in the complex case, five for the GMC and two for Stebbing. The hearing is scheduled to finish in April 2021.