Doctors facing a medical tribunal might do well to ensure they personally attend all parts of the hearing process and retain legal representation, new figures suggest.
In a cross-sectional study, GMC researchers conducted a multivariate, step-wise, statistical modelling of all 1,049 physicians referred for regulatory adjudication at a UK medical tribunal, from June 2012 to May 2017, within a population of 310,659. They examined what factors related to the outcomes of adjudication decisions.
Adjusted odds ratios (OR) were calculated for age, race, sex, whether the physician first qualified domestically or internationally, area of practice, source of initial referral, allegation type, whether the physician attended their outcome hearing, and whether they were legally represented for it.
They found no systematic association between the seriousness of outcomes and the age, race, sex, domestic/international qualification, or the area of practice of physicians (P≥.05), except for specialists, who tended to receive outcomes milder than suspension or erasure.
An apparent relationship of outcomes to age (P=.009) or domestic/international qualification (χ2,p=0.014) disappeared once controlling for hearing attendance (P≥.05).
Both non-attendance and lack of legal representation were consistently related to more serious outcomes (ORs 5.28; 95% CI 3.89-7.18, and 1.87; 95% CI 1.34-2.60, respectively; P<.001).
Presenting the findings in BMC Medicine, the authors said: “In contrast to long-held beliefs, we found no systematic evidence for association of the seriousness of regulatory adjudication decisions to the age, race, sex, or domestic/international first qualification of physicians.”
