Shameful decision not to strike Dr Jane Barton from the Medical Register

BBC News reports that the GMC's fitness to practise panel found Jane Barton guilty of serious professional misconduct for prescribing "potentially hazardous" levels of drugs to elderly patients who later died. - The word 'potentially' sits oddly there, doesn't it? - These patients died. The drug levels she prescribed were surely actually hazardous, rather than potentially. - Her victims died. There is surely no greater hazard than death.

This woman should have been ignominiously struck off years ago.

Dr Jane Barton should have been struck long ago. And in my opinion she should be in prison for, in effect, killing twelve of her patients.

Correction: The first sentence in my title should say 'Dr Jane Barton should have been struck off long ago.'

The Telegraph reports that Dr Jane Barton faces being struck off after prescribing overdoses of powerful painkillers to 12 elderly patients who died in her care. When you read the report you will be astonished to discover that the GMC panel "concluded that the facts found proved (both admitted and otherwise) would not be insufficient to support a finding of serious professional misconduct."" and that "allegations that Dr Barton failed to assess patients appropriately before prescribing opiates were not proved.""

You will wonder, along with me, whether the members of the panel are half-wits, though you will doubtless come to conclude, as I have long held, that the GMC offers no protection to the public at all, since it routinely treats erring doctors with the utmost leniency, however grave their error and however grave the consequences.

The GMC should be scrapped. It is a waste of money and by its continued leniency towards negligent and incompetent doctors effectively it endangers the health of the public.

GMC has been failing relatives of the Gosport dead

Independent on Sunday report
"Families threaten to boycott General Medical Council probe into deaths of elderly patients at Hampshire hospital."

It is long past time that the useless and partial GMC were scrapped.