Psychiatrist who was cleared by first tribunal is struck off

A psychiatrist who initially escaped sanction for falsifying documents has been struck off the UK medical register after his case was sent back to the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) by the High Court.

An MPTS decision in 2015 that Okwuolisa Igwilo’s fitness to practise was not impaired was overturned after a rare appeal to the High Court by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care. The authority successfully argued that the panel had given too much weight to his mitigation and apparent remorse and not enough to the gravity of his offence.

Mrs Justice Lang substituted a finding that his fitness to practise was impaired and sent the case back for a new panel to consider an appropriate sanction.1 Unknown to her, Igwilo had meanwhile successfully applied for voluntary erasure from the register. The General Medical Council reinstated his name on the medical register against his wishes, then argued before the new panel that it should be erased.

Igwilo was on a placement at Broadmoor special hospital in November 2012 when he reapplied for a place on the GMC’s specialist register for forensic psychiatrists, his first two attempts having been rejected. He falsified over 40 documents in what Mrs Justice Lang called a “serious and sustained deception” that jeopardised the integrity of the specialist medical list system.

The new MPTS panel agreed with the judge that its predecessor had been “overly generous” in accepting Igwilo’s claims in mitigation. In a “reflective note” submitted in 2015 to the earlier panel, he had continued to call the GMC’s specialist list requirements “cumbersome” and had suggested that he believed that the failure of his first attempt to qualify for the list had been rejected because of his Nigerian surname and university, though he later came to call this view “grossly distorted.”

Tribunal chairman Brian Alderman said that “a period of suspension would not adequately reflect the seriousness of the tribunal’s findings.”

Igwilo has applied for leave to appeal both the High Court decision and the GMC’s reinstatement of his name after voluntary erasure.

Since 31 December 2015 the GMC itself has the power to appeal to the courts against MPTS rulings it considers too lenient.