The GMC Hates Black Shoes

"I am not prepared to clean your shoes, GMC"

It is a fact of life that the General Medical Council is institutionally racist. The fact is they have not progressed beyond the Last Days of the Raj. The token asians invited to join them and the minority pictures on their website are simply lip service. I do not make these statements lightly. I am a British Asian doctor with a clipped English accent yet my colour matters to the General Medical Council. Indeed, everything about my demeanor matters because I am not English. I summarised the research on Institutional Racism at the GMC here. The most important summary is research provided by the BMJ last year. The abstract stated

"Doctors who qualified outside the United Kingdom or Europe are still falling foul of the General Medical Council, the UK medical regulator, in greater numbers than their home-grown counterparts, new statistics from the GMC show.

Despite research looking into the disparity in 2000 and 2005, the GMC is still trying to identify the reasons; the disparity remains despite reforms to the council’s fitness to practise procedures in 2004.

The GMC’s 2008 fitness to practise statistics show that when initial complaints were triaged, 44% of those involving international medical graduates (those from outside the UK or Europe) went into the "serious" stream (stream 1, where a full investigation is carried out) compared with only 29% of those involving UK graduates"

Many many years ago, a doctor called Aneez Esmail decided to do a study on the General Medical Council. Those brave days are over for Aneez, nevertheless, this speech of his is interesting.

"It is fair to say that the GMC's action did not endear us to them nor them to us and we decided that the next avenue for investigation should be the GMC. We had receive anecdotal evidence that ethnic minority doctors were more likely to be disciplined compared to white doctors. Of course no one kept any information on this so we decided with the help of the BBC to investigate the GMC complaints procedure. We looked back over ten years of records and identified all the cases that had come before their Professional Conduct Committee. What we found was quite amazing. Ethnic minority doctors were six times more likely to be brought before the Professional Conduct Committee of the GMC than white doctors. When we published our findings the GMC's position was that this was nothing to do with them, that all they did was act as a clearing house for complaints. There was of course an incredible outcry about this and because of our investigation they were forced to hold an internal inquiry into the whole issue of complaints. Not only did our investigation find that there was a disproportionate number of ethnic minority doctors brought before the GMC but there are some very interesting differences in the actual charges that were laid against those doctors. That research was published in the BMJ as well and I don't want to go into too much detail about that work, but suffice to say that the case against the GMC was quite damning as was their response to this finding. The subsequent enquiry that was headed by an academic researcher called Isobel Allen concluded that the GMC's procedures were archaic, and that whilst the charge of racial discrimination could not be levelled against them it could also not be disproved. The GMC has now had a complete overhaul of its procedures and has agreed to ethnic monitoring of its complaints procedures. Interestingly one of the criticisms made by the GMC against us was that it wasn't their problem because they just dealt with complaints. In fact the independent inquiry found that in terms of complaints there were no more complaints against ethnic minority doctors than there were against white doctors. The problem was that the GMC seemed to take the complaints made against ethnic minority doctors much more seriously which is why so many more cases appeared before the Professional Conduct Committee. This is important because I have also maintained that it is not the problem that the doctors that are brought before the GMC are in some ways mis-tried, it is just that I believe a lot more doctors should be brought before the GMC. My conclusion is that if you are white you have more chance of getting away with misdemeanours than if you were an ethnic minority doctor"

Esmail did his study many many years ago. The BMJ then reported the matter here.

"Doctors from ethnic minority groups in Britain are six times more likely than white colleagues to be brought before the conduct committee of the General Medical Council (GMC), according to research released last week by the Medical Practitioners' Union. Dr Sam Everington and Dr Aneez Esmail found that between 1982 and 1991 a total of 402 doctors had been brought before the committee, of whom nearly 60% were from ethnic minorities. Fewer than one in five doctors in Britain is from an ethnic minority. The authors, who studied data collected from the minutes of the committee's proceedings, used doctors' surnames to estimate the number from ethnic minorities. "If anything, our figures underestimate the imbalance," said Dr Everington. "We worked on the assumption that most doctors from ethnic minorities are Indian or Pakistani. We are not saying that these doctors did not deserve disciplining...."

The situation has not changed from 1994-2009. It also shows us that between these years, the GMC has done little to mend their ways. I have of course caught the GMC out a number of times. In 2004, they took up a complaint in defamation against me. Prior to that in 2002, they refused to take up a complaint of defamation against Dr Neil Bacon, a caucasian doctor. In 2007, the GMC wrote me a letter stating that they did not deal with defamation cases. We then ask ourselves the question, why was I investigated for 6 months?

My most interesting development is the discovery of two competing analysis of the word "misconduct" currently being touted through the courts. The first is regarding me, a British Asian. The GMC gives me a strict definition. The second is that regarding Caucasian senior doctors [ R v GMC Ex Parte Remedy UK], the GMC gives them a lax definition. The analysis of Professional Misconduct is presented by Doctors4Justice. It is notable that Collins J in discussion on R v GMC Ex Pare Pal, has agreed that the decisions of factually identical complaints can be diametrically opposite for two different individuals. Collins J has therefore effectively agreed that racism should be continued at the General Medical Council.