A Glasgow doctor who was struck off for going AWOL from a busy A&E ward to take a nap has been handed her licence back.
Dr Raisah Sawati was found by a nurse asleep on a bench wrapped in a blanket after colleagues reported her missing from duty at Fairfield Hospital in Greater Manchester.
At the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) last year, the 33-year-old's fledgling career in medicine was left in tatters after she was found guilty of misconduct, dishonesty and deficient professional performance.
However, the MPTS has performed a U-turn on its ruling after a High Court judge quashed the decision. Instead, at a new tribunal, the MPTS ruled Dr Sawati is to be suspended for six months, the Daily Record reports.
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It was heard the High Court quashed the decision as the original tribunal unfairly held Dr Sawati's maintaining of innocence against her.
Misconduct concerns arose in four different training placements undertaken by Dr Sawati after she graduated in medicine back in 2012 in Manchester.
During one placement at Fairfield General Hospital in Bury in 2017, she falsely claimed a colleague had agreed to swap shifts with her so she could take time off and claimed to have been the lead A&E doctor treating the seriously ill infant in a resuscitation room when in fact she had only provided a ''supporting role.''
At Alexandra Practice in Manchester, Lancashire, in January 2014, it was heard she failed to discuss symptoms with a patient who later died, and then amended medical records to claim she did discuss them. And while working at Manchester Royal Infirmary in January 2015 she was found lying on a bed with lights off after asking to leave a main theatre block.
At the High Court, Justice Rowena Collins Rice ruled the tribunal that struck Dr Sawati off had unfairly used her "rejected defences to the allegations of dishonesty as grounds for aggravating sanction". She ruled this impeded her right to defend herself in the tribunal.
In her ruling, she said: "The challenge to the decision to erase Dr Sawati from the register raises an issue which has regularly engaged the appellate courts in recent years; how a professional can have a fair chance before a Tribunal to resist allegations, particularly of dishonesty, without finding the resistance itself unfairly counting against them if they are unsuccessful.
"Where a doctor unsuccessfully defends a dishonesty allegation, they are at risk of being found for that reason not to have told the Tribunal 'the truth' (about being dishonest) and therefore to be compounding the dishonesty - a predicament labelled before now as 'Kafkaesque'.
"The tribunal seems to have relied disproportionately and without analysis on her rejected defences to infer both failure of insight and tertiary dishonesty ('not telling the truth in the hearing'). These are in my view serious failures... I am not satisfied that Dr Sawati was treated fairly in this respect."
Justice Collins Rice quashed the tribunal's sanction of a striking off order. At the latest tribunal, Dr Sawati was suspended for six months.
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