Doctor guilty of professional misconduct over sick certs

A doctor has been found guilty of two counts of professional misconduct after he presented fabricated medical certs in an attempt to secure a deferral of an exam.

The Medical Council’s fitness to practise committee found on Tuesday that other charges that the doctor allegedly forged and/or arranged for the forgery of the handwritten certs were not proven.

Under the provisions of the Medical Practitioners Act 2007, the committee decided last week to hold the hearing "otherwise than in public" to the extent that the name of the doctor be anonymised in media coverage. Committee chair Mary Duff requested that he be identified only as 'Dr A'.

Dr A has been on an ophthalmology training programme at Limerick University Hospital since July 2012. He had applied to the Royal College of Ophthalmologists in London to sit the first part of the college’s fellowship exams on October 6th, 2014. The fitness to practise committee heard the doctor, referred to as Dr A, did not present to sit the exam, for which the fee was £550 (about €654).

He subsequently contacted the Royal College and requested that it defer his exam to the next available date, saying he had been unable to sit it due to health reasons.

Eoghan O'Sullivan BL, for the chief executive of the Medical Council, told the hearing last Tuesday that the allegations effectively boiled down to the authenticity of two medical certificates furnished to third parties in October 2014, one dated October 4th and the other dated October 7th.

Prof Stephen Lane, a consultant respiratory and general physician, told the committee on the first day of the hearing the act of "fraudulently" writing a certificate in the name of a non-existent doctor would be either "disgraceful or dishonourable" and constitute professional misconduct.

Paul Anthony McDermott SC argued that it was inappropriate for the committee to use the term “forgery”, which was a criminal offence carrying a sentence of up to 10 years.

Following submissions by both sides on Tuesday, legal assessor to the committee Seamus Woulfe SC said it seemed to him there was no generally accepted layman’s meaning of the term forgery.

“Even as a lawyer I don’t understand there’s an alternative meaning of the word forged,” he said.

Mr McDermott handed the committee a reference from a consultant ophthalmic surgeon who, he said, was aware of the complaint against the doctor.

The surgeon was impressed with Dr A, found him hard-working, trustworthy and compassionate, with an “exceptional sense of ethics” and who enjoyed good relationships with his colleagues.

Following deliberations, the committee found the two charges of alleged forgery of the certificates had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

It also found not proven a charge that he had signed or arranged for the signing of the October 7th certificate on the headed paper of the South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital in the name of a Dr Massood Khan. The committee had heard no doctor of that name had been practising at the hospital, or in Ireland, at the time.

It found proven the charges that Dr A had submitted the October 7th certificate and the October 4th certificates when he knew or ought to have known that they were fabricated.

Committee chair Mary Duff, sitting with Dr Mary Henry and lay member Geraldine Feeney, said the committee would be making recommendations as regards sanction when it presented its findings to the Medical Council.