Simon Phillips QC acts on behalf of the GMC at the Court of Appeal

Simon Phillips QC, instructed by the General Medical Council, successfully responded to an appeal by a doctor who was erased from the medical register by the Fitness to Practise Panel of the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal Service for misconduct in relation to issues of probity and integrity. In a significant jurisprudential development, Lord Justice Longmore directed that in future the traditional Ghosh test for determining dishonesty in medical professional disciplinary hearings should be modified, and that in place of the test for dishonesty being with reference to the standards of the “reasonable and honest person”, in future it would be necessary for “the first part of the direction to be adapted to read that the panel should decide whether according to the standard of reasonable and honest doctors [not people] what was done was dishonest”.

The judgment is reported at: Hussain v GMC [2014] EWCA Civ 2246; [2015] Med. L.R. 9. The decision, which may result in the re-writing of the test for dishonesty in all professional disciplinary hearings, has already been applied in proceedings involving a social worker, in the case of Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care v Health and Care Professions Council [2014] EWHC 4657 (Admin).

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