Clare Dyer

A 5 year old girl in England was left bleeding, traumatised, and screaming with pain after a physician associate (PA; now known as a physician assistant) wrongly prescribed a pessary to treat itching and vaginal discharge, an investigation by the parliamentary and health service ombudsman has found.1Vaginal pessaries should not be used in prepubescent children, but a GP authorised the prescription on the basis of the PA's recommendation, and a pharmacy dispensed the pessary without questioning it.In March 2023 the girl's mother, named as Mrs N, took her daughter, H, to their general practice in the East Midlands. She saw a PA her mother thought was a GP, who suspected that H had thrush. The PA opted for a clotrimazole pessary (an antifungal) and cream.In fact, said the ombudsman's report, H's symptoms were consistent with paediatric vulvovaginitis, not …

An “exhausted” NHS consultant anaesthetist died of alcohol and drug toxicity after working nine 13 hour hospital shifts in a row, a coroner’s inquest has heard.Naeem Ahmed, 50, was found slumped in a chair in the anaesthetists’ on-call room at Poole Hospital in Dorset on 21 June 2025, next to two syringes and a half empty bottle of whisky.Entry to the room was forced after the doctor taking over when Ahmed finished his shift could not find him for the handover. Ahmed’s clinical decision making during the final shift had been “faultless,” …

A doctor suspended from the UK medical register for having an improper relationship with a teenage patient he had met in hospital years before when he was a student will be allowed to practise again from next month.1Cian Hughes was suspended for 12 months from July 2025 after a medical practitioners tribunal found that he had pursued an improper emotional relationship with a teenager known as patient A, knowing that they were vulnerable, and who he had sexual intercourse with once they turned 18.2Now, a tribunal reviewing the case decided that Hughes “continued to demonstrate genuine remorse, insight, and remediation in relation to his misconduct,” and that there was no evidence to undermine the original tribunal’s findings that the risk of repetition was low.Responding, patient A said that the review tribunal’s decision was “devastating, particularly in …

A doctor who failed to declare 14 Australian convictions, including stalking and threatening to kill, when applying for UK medical registration, has been struck off for dishonesty.1However, Salah-ud-Din Taj was able to work in the NHS for years before the matter came to light.In his application for full General Medical Council (GMC) registration in 2018, Taj said he had no relevant cautions or convictions to declare. He also answered “no” to a similar question on an application form for a locum consultant post at North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust in 2019.The trust then went on to employ him for one month in 2020, and Taj later went on to secure a post at Lincoln County Hospital in 2022.North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, of which the University Hospitals trust became part, later discovered his Australian convictions …

A former doctor who went on the run in the US more than 20 years ago during his trial for sexual assault has been arrested on board his sailboat off the New Jersey coast, US authorities have said.1Ronald Fischer, 70, a former anaesthesiologist, was for two decades one of Rhode Island’s most wanted fugitives after disappearing in April 2005 while standing trial for first degree sexual assault. He was later convicted in his absence.The 56 foot boat, Silver Lining , was registered in the name of Richard Graydon, one of several aliases said to have been used by Fischer. He …

Police are investigating the NHS mental health trust that provided care to the triple killer Valdo Calocane for corporate manslaughter.Calocane, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, fatally stabbed two 19 year old Nottingham University students, Grace O’Malley Kumar and Barnaby Webber, and a 65 year old school caretaker, Ian Coates, in June 2023.He also drove Coates’s van into people at a nearby bus stop, seriously injuring three.Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust had sectioned Calocane four times between 2020 and 2022. He had been involved in a series of violent incidents and had refused to take his medication.An NHS …

A surgeon who botched an operation so badly that it was described as “not compatible with life” has been struck off the UK medical register.1It was eventually discovered that Yasser Abdel Rahman, who originally qualified in Egypt, had created a closed loop where contents leaving the stomach could only return to the organ. An expert consulted as part of the proceedings said that the procedure was “not known to man.”Abdel Rahman had joined Oldham General Hospital as a locum consultant general and colorectal surgeon for only a few days before the incident occurred on 25 August 2020. The case concerned a patient—referred to as Patient A—who required an emergency out-of-hours gastrojejunostomy, a procedure that directly connects the stomach to the middle portion of the small intestine, which Abdel Rahman …

A family court judgment holding a doctor responsible for abusing his former partner and barring him from contact with his child may be disclosed to the General Medical Council, the judge overseeing the case has ruled.1Family court cases in England and Wales are heard in private and the parties are anonymised. Disclosure of information from private family law proceedings may be made only with the court’s express permission.Case law does not show any previous cases involving disclosure to the GMC, the doctors’ regulator. But in taking the decision at the family court in Cardiff to allow disclosure, Judge Adem Muzaffer reviewed earlier cases in which judgments or documents from family cases were allowed to be …

A doctor who prescribed weight loss drugs to a man she met on a dating app has had her suspension from the UK medical register extended after a review.1Josevania Martins, who runs a private gynaecology and fertility clinic in Hampstead, north London, was suspended for nine months in October 2025, after a medical practitioners tribunal found that she had acted dishonestly in treating the man, by concealing her profession and her role in the prescribing.2She had also failed to keep proper records of the treatment and had knowingly written false information on prescriptions for semaglutide (as both Ozempic and Wegovy) in December 2023 and February 2024, the tribunal found.The October 2025 tribunal that suspended Martins set a review hearing at the end …

A doctor struck off in 2020 after refusing to attend a hearing at the end of a suspension for plagiarism has been allowed to go back on the UK medical register.Sudip Chowdhury persuaded a tribunal that he has now developed insight and remediated his misconduct.1At the time a specialist trainee in paediatrics, Chowdhury was found to have submitted work that was not his own in a 2018 assignment for a postgraduate diploma in child health accredited by the University of Leeds.He said that the plagiarism was caused by uploading errors, but he was found guilty by a university investigation.Chowdhury failed to mention the university investigation on a form requiring disclosure that he completed prior to his annual …