A Scots doctor who was struck off for going AWOL from a busy A&E ward to go for a nap has been handed her licence back after a court ruled her punishment was too unfair. Dr Raisah Sawati was found sleeping on the job when there were patients who needed to be seen.
After two hours of being missing, her colleagues found her snoozing on a bench in the female hospital changing room, with a blanket wrapped over her. At a Medical Practitioners Tribunal last year, a panel stripped 33-year-old Dr Sawati of her medical licence by removing her from the register.
However, a High Court judge quashed the decision and now the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service [MPTS] has U-turned on its ruling. Instead, at a new tribunal, the MPTS ruled Dr Sawati is to be suspended for six months.
It was heard the High Court quashed the decision as the original tribunal unfairly held Dr Sawati's maintaining of innocence against her. Dr Sawati, said to be from Glasgow, was originally found guilty of misconduct, dishonesty and deficient professional performance.
Misconduct concerns arose in four different training placements undertaken by Dr Sawati while she was training over a period of four years. It was found that she left her post without permission to lie down when she was feeling ill at Fairfield Hospital in Bury, Lancs, in March 2017.
Colleagues raised the alarm when they couldn't find her as her patients needed follow-ups, and they eventually found her in the changing room. She had falsely claimed a colleague agreed to swap shifts with her to take time off.
At Alexandra Practice in Manchester, Lancashire, in January 2014, it was heard she failed to discuss symptoms with a patient who later died, and then amended medical records to claim she did discuss them. And while working at Manchester Royal Infirmary in January 2015 she was found lying on a bed with lights off after asking to leave a main theatre block.
At the High Court, Justice Rowena Collins Rice ruled the tribunal that struck Dr Sawati off had unfairly used her "rejected defences to the allegations of dishonesty as grounds for aggravating sanction". She ruled this impeded her right to defend herself in the tribunal.
In her ruling, she said: "The challenge to the decision to erase Dr Sawati from the register raises an issue which has regularly engaged the appellate courts in recent years; how a professional can have a fair chance before a Tribunal to resist allegations, particularly of dishonesty, without finding the resistance itself unfairly counting against them if they are unsuccessful.
"Where a doctor unsuccessfully defends a dishonesty allegation, they are at risk of being found for that reason not to have told the Tribunal 'the truth' (about being dishonest) and therefore to be compounding the dishonesty - a predicament labelled before now as 'Kafkaesque'.
"The tribunal seems to have relied disproportionately and without analysis on her rejected defences to infer both failure of insight and tertiary dishonesty ('not telling the truth in the hearing'). These are in my view serious failures... I am not satisfied that Dr Sawati was treated fairly in this respect."
Justice Collins Rice quashed the tribunal's sanction of a striking off order. At the latest tribunal, Dr Sawati was suspended for six months.
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