A medical tribunal has struck off a clinician and social media influencer who defrauded the health service of more than £50,000 (€59,200) by submitting false time sheets. Another recent tribunal issued a warning to a radiologist over his quality of care.
In a hearing that concluded on 30 August 2024, the Medical Practitioners Tribunals Service (MPTS) recommended that Dr. Kifayat Ullah should be erased from the register for his actions while he worked as a locum at Kingston Hospital National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust. This follows a court case earlier this year when he was given a 24-month suspended sentence after a hospital audit identified discrepancies in its records and an NHS counter fraud investigation was carried out.
Ullah was recruited as a locum consultant to help with the post-COVID backlog within the trust. Soon after starting the job, he asked hospital managers to reduce his hours to part-time working, but for six months, he submitted 29 falsified time sheets to his agency claiming that he was working full time and was paid accordingly. He altered some time sheets after they had been signed, while others were entirely forged.
The August tribunal imposed an immediate order of suspension to cover the 28-day appeal period.
Quality of care warning
In another hearing that concluded on 20 August 2024, the MPTS gave a warning to Dr. Sohail Khan, who qualified in medicine in 1996 at Kamatak University in Dharwad, India. He held various posts in India and Saudi Arabia before starting work in the U.K. as a locum consultant radiologist in January 2011. From March 2023, Khan was employed as a locum consultant radiologist at Antrim Area Hospital in Northern Ireland.
The tribunal focused on Khan’s practice between 2018 and 2019, when he was a consultant radiologist and medical director of BestCare Diagnostic, a company providing diagnostics and screening nonobstetric ultrasound services.
The main allegation was that Khan failed to monitor and review the work that BestCare was providing. As a result, he was allegedly unable to provide the West Sussex NHS Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG)/Coastal West Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group with accurate information in a timely manner to assist with their Clinical Harm Review, which commenced in June 2020.
It was also alleged that Khan only instigated four serious incident reports (SIs). Khan accepted that the SIs concerned incidents of basic imaging errors of interpretation and were not completed in a timely manner. It was also claimed that the SIs BestCare instigated should have prompted Khan to invoke a clinical review to assess the overall performance of BestCare, but he did not do so.
It was also alleged that 64 patients assessed by the CCG were found to have suffered physical and/or psychological harm, of which 29 had experienced moderate to severe harm. This allegation was not proven, however.
Khan accepted that he had a lack of any prior experience of being a medical director and had not familiarized himself beforehand with the role, having had no prior experience of writing SIs. He accepted that he could have written the three SIs to a higher standard. The tribunal noted that Khan only worked 1.5 days a week at BestCare, and he largely left the duty of day-to-day operation to others.
An expert witness referred to as "Professor A" gave evidence at the tribunal. He is a consultant radiologist and has been both deputy medical director and interim medical director at University Hospitals Bristol and Weston. "Professor A" explained that the role of a medical director is vital for patient safety and entails a duty to oversee the process and sign off SI reports on behalf of the CEO. He was involved with commissioning and signing off 150 SIs and, while he conceded he had no experience as a medical director running a diagnostic imaging company, said that the role is the same as in the NHS.
Concerns over sonographers
The tribunal was concerned that the minutes of the two BestCare sonographer meetings held on 17 February 2019 and 1 July 2019 were an exact duplication of each other. The tribunal further noted that references to sick leave and exit interviews were repeated on at least five occasions and that the minutes of the governance meeting supposedly held on 16 June 2018 contained references to a discussion about the SIs received from CCG, which were only received in 2019.
The tribunal recognized that BestCare ceased trading in December 2019 and went into liquidation in January 2020 and as a result, Khan may have faced difficulty obtaining records for two audits conducted in 2019. Nevertheless, the audits failed to show that Khan was monitoring the performance levels of sonographers, it stated.
