Almost one in three UK doctors investigated by the General Medical Council (GMC) think about taking their own life, a survey has found.
Many doctors under investigation feel they are treated as “guilty until proven innocent” and face “devastating” consequences, the Medical Protection Society (MPS) said.
The regulator pursues too many cases against doctors for minor alleged matters and often takes months, and sometimes years, to make a ruling, it added.
Its survey of 197 doctors investigated by the GMC over the last five years found:
31% said they had suicidal thoughts.
8% had quit medicine and another 29% had thought about doing so.
78% said the investigation damaged their mental health.
91% said it triggered stress and anxiety.
The MPS, which represents doctors accused of wrongdoing, accused the GMC of lacking compassion, being heavy-handed and failing to appreciate its impact on doctors.
One doctor told the MPS: “I did feel my life was not worth living after how much I had dedicated to being a doctor.” Another had “occasional thoughts that if I was no longer here, this would all go away”. A third felt they had been left “permanently damaged” after three years of psychotherapy.
In March last year, the GMC said 29 doctors died between January 2018 and December 2020 while it was investigating them. Five of those were found to have been suicides.
Dr Rob Hendry, the MPS’s medical director, said: “Finding out your fitness to practise is being called into question can be devastating and it is easy to see how a doctor’s mental health could deteriorate if they feel they are considered guilty from the outset.”
The MPS praised the GMC’s efforts to improve its communications with doctors under investigation but urged the regulator to go further. For example, it said the GMC should use kinder, more empathic language in the first letter it sends to a doctor telling them that someone has complained, and also when writing to tell them that it is taking no further action.
There was a huge outcry among medics last year when the GMC suspended Dr Manjula Arora, a GP, for a month for allegedly dishonestly saying she had been promised a work laptop computer. The regulator later admitted handling the case badly and apologised to her.
The British Medical Association (BMA), the main doctors’ union, said the MPS’s findings showed that the GMC’s procedures needed to be radically overhauled.
“Doctors’ confidence in the GMC has been persistently eroded, feeling as though it is more interested in pursuing and punishing them than it is about finding out what really happened and learning from events,” said Prof Philip Banfield, the BMA’s chair of council. “These concerning findings underline the sense of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ that doctors under investigation experience, and the feeling of hopelessness this can cause.”
He called for “a root-and-branch independent evaluation of the entire GMC referral pathway” to create a system that protects patients and is “just, fair and proportionate” to doctors.
Charlie Massey, the GMC’s chief executive, stressed that the regulator was legally obliged to look into concerns raised about a medic’s fitness to practise. But he added: “We know receiving a complaint can be a cause of great distress and anxiety for doctors.”
He said it had made improvements to its processes “to take a more compassionate and proportionate approach, and to reduce the impact of our processes on all involved in an investigation”.
For example, the GMC makes provisional inquiries to help it decide whether or not to mount a full investigation, and in some cases avoids that by “managing concerns locally”, he added.
The Department of Health and Social Care said it would reform the GMC. A spokesperson said: “We are committed to modernising the regulatory framework for doctors as a top priority. Our proposed reforms will provide the GMC with greater flexibility to close more cases that do not meet the threshold for regulatory action at initial assessment and deliver fitness to practise processes that are faster, fairer and less adversarial.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
