Attwaters Solicitors

The government is considering compulsory training and induction programmes for doctors have never worked in England before, in a review of safety following the case of a German doctor who accidentally killed a patient on his first out-of-hours locum shift in this country.
Also under discussion is the creation of a national database that would allow NHS organisations and private providers to check whether applicants for GP work had failed in previous attempts. Employers could also find out more easily whether doctors had formal warnings or disciplinary restrictions on the work they could do when they moved from different parts of the country.
Measures to standardize the ways local NHS trusts check applicants’ standard of English and medical competence are being studied too, as part of a broad review of out-of-hours work. The General Medical Council, the profession’s regulator, says it is willing to hold the data nationally. Ministers would have to approve the package.
The GMC is also stepping up its campaign to change the rules for recognizing medical qualifications across the EU. It wants doctors from Europe to face tests on their knowledge and skills before being added to the professional register in this country, like doctors from other parts of the world, but a European commission review of the rules is not planned until 2012.
The latest moves follow the incident in February 2008 when Daniel Ubani gave 70 year-old David Gray from Manea, Cambridgeshire, a 10-fold overdose of a painkiller, having never worked in the UK nor used the drug.
An inquest into the deaths of Gray and Iris Edwards, a woman in her 80s whom Ubani visited at a care home the same weekend in February 2008, opens on Thursday. Ubani has been convicted in Germany for causing Gray’s death by negligence, so preventing a possible manslaughter charge in the UK.
Under the system for GPs’ employment, they must first be on the GMC register, indicating their broad ability to practise, and second be on a performers’ list, kept by local NHS trusts who are responsible for ensuring a doctor is “fit for purpose” at a particular job. A locum doctor need only be on one local trust’s list to be allowed to work anywhere.
The doctor failed in his first attempt to join a performers list run by the NHS in Leeds, withdrawing his application when he failed to secure enough marks in an English test. He was later approved by Cornwall NHS which then had less stringent rules on proof of language skills and intention to work in the local area, although it has since tightened them.
Madeline Seibert, a partner at Attwaters and one of the firm’s clinical negligence specialists, welcomes the move.
‘Since Mr Ubani withdrew his application to the Leeds trust rather than being formally rejected, withdrawals as well as rejections ought to be recorded nationally,’ Madeline Seibert suggests.
‘It’s scandalous that a previous report had already identified weaknesses in the system but its recommendations haven’t been implemented.
‘Action could and should have been taken a long time ago, but patients have been left at risk because the system didn’t act it should have done. There have been too many similar examples and it’s time the loopholes were filled in.’