A FRENCH doctor who failed to inform the Irish Medical Council that he had been suspended from practising in France or that he had a number of convictions there when he registered to work in Ireland has been found guilty of professional misconduct.
A fitness-to-practise committee of the council decided last night that Dr Hervé Doustaing (52) should be struck off the medical register for his "systematic and repeated failures" to disclose information about his past to the Irish Medical Council and the General Medical Council in the UK.
Dr Doustaing has worked as a locum GP in the State since 2008, offering his services through the Locumotion employment agency to family doctors and prisons.
The committee heard he is prohibited from practising in the UK and in France, but the French decision is under appeal.
Dr Doustaing, giving evidence through an interpreter, said he felt the convictions were minor and did not need to be declared. Two related to tax fraud in 1996, another to verbally assaulting a police officer. He also said when he applied to be registered with the Irish Medical Council in October 2004 that he did not mention he had been suspended from practising for two months in France in 2000 because that decision was later quashed.
But JP McDowell, solicitor for the Irish Medical Council, said this was not the case. The 2000 decision to suspend him over the misdiagnosis of a patient injured while skiing and overcharging a patient had been reaffirmed in 2003, Mr McDowell said, and there was documentation to prove this.