The petty cruelty of the GMC

Doctors make mistakes. We mess up, have lapses in judgment, do stupid or downright wrong things. Some break the law, some violate trust. Patients place their wellbeing, and sometimes their lives, in our hands. So it’s only right that we are held to account. All good doctors want scrutiny.

Our regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), is supposed to be there to uphold the standards of the medical profession. It’s meant to help maintain the trust that the public places in us. This, of course, gives it an extraordinary amount of power: it can take away livelihoods.

But the GMC has lost our trust. Many doctors feel that the organisation is now out of control, hellbent on pursuing petty indiscretions above all else. Increasingly, it looks like a vindictive, sclerotic and overly bureaucratic embarrassment that assumes a degree of guilt from the start and aggressively pursues doctors as a result. After a number of appallingly misguided cases, the doctor’s union, the British Medical Association (BMA), has called for a complete overhaul of how the GMC operates.