Record complaints against doctors

The number of complaints has been rising

Record numbers of complaints are being made against doctors, according to the General Medical Council.

Last year, the GMC received 4,980 complaints, compared to 4,452 in 2004, and 3,926 in 2003.

A breakdown of the figures revealed a "highly disproportionate" number of complaints were being made against medics trained overseas.

It also found a doctor is 64% more likely to be complained against if they qualified 20 years ago or longer.

The Fitness to Practise statistics are published annually by the GMC. The latest figures analyse the year up to 31 December 2005.

In this period, eight doctors were struck off who had been referred by members of the public, 23 who had been referred by a public body, like an NHS trust, one by another doctor, and four by another organisation, such as a private hospital.

Reasons for complaints included substandard treatment, criminality, violence and sexual assault.

Some 81% of the doctors complained against were male; 19% female.

Additional research by the York Economic Consortium carried out a further analysis of the numbers, providing a breakdown of gender, time since qualification, and place of qualification of those complained against.

It found a "disproportionate" amount of people who had qualified from overseas were being reported, but added the "country of origin should not be used as a proxy for ethnicity".

It also found the majority of complaints are made against doctors who qualified 20 or more years ago.

Neil Marshall, head of screening at the GMC, said the figures from the York research still showed the GMC had a problem to tackle.

He said "We expected that when York reported, it would say there are still a complexity of factors where you'd want to do long-term work to find out where the discrepancies are and why the problems occur.

"These could be with the source of the complaint. There may be something in the male/female ratio of doctors or with time from qualification and when overseas doctors come to the UK.

"These are all hypothesis at the moment and need to be tested. We simply want to do the work to find out."