Just over one in five doctors who died between 2005 and 2013 during investigations into their fitness to practise committed suicide, according to the General Medical Council (GMC).
In a recent report, the GMC said that of the 114 deaths, 24 were classified as “suicide” and four as “suspected suicide”.
The GMC keeps a register of medical practitioners who are fit to work in the UK. When the doctors’ regulator receives a complaint, it investigates the doctor’s fitness to practise.
The report, Doctors who commit suicide while under GMC fitness to practise investigation, found that many who committed suicide were already vulnerable due to pre-existing conditions like depression.
It noted, however, that contributing factors included “the involvement of the police and the impact of the GMC investigation”.
The GMC believes that doctors under investigation should feel they are treated as “innocent until proven guilty”.
“We know that for any doctor, being investigated by the GMC is a stressful experience and very often follows other traumas in their lives. Our first duty must, of course, be to protect patients but we are determined to do everything we can to make sure we handle these cases as sensitively as possible, to ensure the doctors are being supported locally and to reduce the impact of our procedures,” said GMC chief executive Niall Dickson.
These findings come days after the Public Administration Select Committee launched an inquiry into the best way of dealing with clinical failure in the NHS and stamping out the culture of blame.
Between 2005 and 2013, 3795 of the 8817 cases brought to the GMC included some element of clinical incompetence.