To feel very sorry for this doctor

[runningpram]

I feel the way this lady has been treated is appalling.
Obviously this wasn’t the right thing to do but she wasn’t leaving early and there was no patient detriment. Why were her managers not supporting her better?
Why on earth could not this have been sorted out within the practise without a formal disciplinary process? As a working mum I really feel for her. Could someone medical shed light on why this would have been blown up into such an issue?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15422147/amp/GP-faked-medical-appointments-work-not-late-afternoon-school-run-suspended-practising-5-months.html

This is very dishonest. There are plenty of working parents in the NHS and we fix our childcare around clinical commitments. GP and hospital appointments are extremely difficult to get and within my hospital speciality, the waiting time for a routine appointment from the point of referral is currently 6-8 months. It reads as if she had been doing this regularly and that makes it even worse. As a locum she had the option to work less or leave and find something more appropriate to her situation. We didn’t even block out clinic slots during the strikes because we are fully aware of how detrimental it is to patient care and outcomes.

She said that she had felt no pressure to work extra hours and that her practice was very flexible and accommodating

Sssshhh, @NextItsBooty - you're spoiling it by bringing in more inconvenient facts

That doesn't make sense because she was putting in false consultations with patients.

Absolutely
She received payment for appointments that didn't take place
She booked patients into appointment slots that they didnt attend, depriving the practice of consultations
She falsified patient medical records
She denied it all.

Doctors are expected to behave with honesty and integrity at all times
She should have been struck off

And, let’s face it, one of the reasons it’s attracting so much media attention is the ongoing industrial action. I know she isn’t a resident doctor but it is still a current issue ( especially as the NHS struggles with winter demand) and fuels the debate.

@robinsinthesnowBut we don’t know it was an inflexible work place. No where in the judgement or her own mitigation has she said they wouldn’t have let her go early/saved tge last appointment for admin etc etc. Yet poster after poster going on about the ‘poor mum’ and the horrible practice discriminating against her. I may have had some sympathy if she said she’d asked and been refused but there is nothing to say this was the case. Even then it’s no excuse to falsify medical records. She choose to do a locum shift with the clear intention of blocking out the last appointment so she could go on time.

There is also nowhere where is says she had no one else to pick them. She fully intended at the start of her day to falsify medical records for financial gain.

There is a huge question mark over her probity. She falsified records at 4:30pm by saying that she had appointments with patient’s A&B who she’d actually had TP appointments with that morning. She even said she examined them! She then lied again when a colleague said she hadn’t completed the consultation note (I wonder if they were suspicious of her due to previous behaviour and checked). In stead of coming clean she decided to falsify the record saying she’d seen and examined the patient. When this was found to be untrue and she was challenged she lied again and said she ‘thought she had’ and it was a mistake. Even when she referred herself to the GMC likely because she was told to by the practice she continued to lie in her referral. The truth was only discovered after investigation. She’s not upset she did it just that she’s been found out.

In fact something I thought amusing in her very belated reflection was her saying, ‘a commitment to immediate honesty, even if it feels uncomfortable or embarrassing’. So basically she’s promised not to lie in the future?! Surely a Dr not lying is a basic?!

In my opinion she’s got off really likely and if you think she’s been treated harshly because ‘she’s a woman’ a Quick Look though MOTS judgements would show that to be incorrect.

I did a job where is was not possible to just finish when you wanted and I know people in that job who have been sacked (not suspended) for lying about taking time off (both men an women). Childcare was a nightmare especially as their Dad worked over an hour away from the children’s nursery and I would have to ring him by 4 at the latest to give him a fighting chance to pick them up on time but I never ever lied to get time off even though I did work in very misogynistic organisation.

On the Mail online article posted to Facebook - former med school colleagues are saying she is incredibly hard working and this is a stupid mistake blown out of proportion.

Also a vet. I also sympathise with the not leaving on time. This can be compounded when other staff, despite knowing you need to leave on time for collecting kids still book in extra late appointments which have no hope of finishing on time. I build in an extra hour’s leeway time so for example finish at 2 before school run and sometimes still cut it fine to leave with much time to spare. It is not fair on clients either if they are facing a sad or difficult situation such as putting an animal to sleep.

My current practice is much better and will allow us the last 30minutes of the day as catch up/clinical admin time so it would only be a true emergency that might hold you up.

Perhaps there is some context to this, if her practice was not supportive of her schedule and she had repeated issues of overbooking/over-running which pushed her to make a bad decision. Unfortunately she compounded this with dishonesty and it sounds like falsifying medical notes, which takes it into a whole more serious misconduct category.

The sensible decision would be to have an alternative childcare back up, reducing her hours or not taking locum shifts at practices which don’t timetable the day effectively to ensure she finished on time.

Fraud and falsifying medical records.

Medical records are legal documents. They're admissable in court.

She'd lose her license here and rightly so.

It's not a stupid mistake though, is it? She knew exactly what she was doing and lied and falsified records in an attempt to get herself out of troubl

I'm not sure why anyone is defending this, it starts to reflect badly on them too.

It's not a mistake. She knew what she was doing.

I feel for her and wonder if she had been so harshly treated as a man?You know "Oh poor chap has to do the school run" sort of thing .Surely a warning would have been enough. NHS needs Doctors then treats them like this!

Well perhaps she took the shift to help out her colleagues and out of a duty to patients hut couldn't overrun. She could do the shift just not the extra hour

I’ve made errors of judgement before and would call them mistakes, as in, it wasn’t my finest hour and I see that when I reflect.

I am glad she’s being supported, the whole thing must be horrible.

NHS does not need dishonest frauds

She was dishonest and that’s obviously unacceptable, but when reading the news story I did think it’s possibly a bit of a sad reflection of modern family life that she resorted to doing this. Who knows without knowing the full story though.

I didn’t say it was.

But it is the GMCs role to uphold professional standards and trust in the profession. Which is why she has been suspended.

Her professional responsibility was to uphold her professional standards. She failed to do that. She lied, continued to lie and potentially put patients at risk.

Did you miss the part where it said colleagues had booked the appointments in to her diary?

Assume this would have been a receptionist. As a senior clinician in the NHS I like to maintain autonomy over my diary because I’m the one doing the actual work. I know realistically how long it takes for me to do my job safely and effectively.
But we are frequently told (by people who don’t do the work itself) that we can do x, y, z amount of contacts per day. And yes, on paper it may look like that - as long as humans can behave like robots and all fit nicely into quantifiable tick boxes. But this doesn’t work in reality because humans are not one size fits all, and if you take into consideration unexpected referrals, follow ups, liaison with other services, safeguarding, risk management etc it can take much longer than managers believe it does.

I will repeat what I said before - I don’t condone what she did - but it’s indicative of deeper issues that are being normalised. When the nhs is finally destroyed by the ever growing pressure to do more with less staff and less time, perhaps people will regret not looking below the surface level at systemic problems.

The first thing that went through my mind was the possibility of the faked appointments impacting insurance claims. (My travel insurance becomes void if I've failed to mention the teeniest matter to the company.)

It's Fraud. I use wraparound care, it was a reason I chose the school. And when I do need to get dc straight from school I use my lunchbreak. I even try to book medical appointments over lunch. When you work in a role that uses taxpayer money its really important not to take the piss.

Being a parent doesn't give you an excuse to cause harm to others.

False info could affect treatment decisions and patients could suffer and be harmed because of the false records.

This is very basic. You do not falsify medical records. She learned this early on and she chose to flout the rules. She could have refused the shifts. She could have hired a nanny for pickups. That's what quite a few of the docs I worked with did.

Sex isn't a factor here. She knowingly committed fraud and falsified legal documents. There's a real lack of professional integrity and lack of concern for the patients whose records she knowingly entered false data into.

I would never willingly go to a doctor who had done that.

I have sympathy with her predicament but she shouldn’t have falsified things. She should have spoken with practice manager/ explained. In some professions there is 0 tolerance for dishonesty. If she’d been a solicitor she’d have lost her right to practice. 5 months seems appropriately both punishment and deterrent for others.

how about starting off with staff not signing up and getting paid for work time that they don't do?

I agree. She didn’t slip off she left at her normal contractual finish time. Sounds
like the failure of the practice that the last slots are booked too close to the end of the day so overrun into her personal time effectively unpaid. I feel hugely sorry for her.