Clare Dyer

A surgeon who botched an operation so badly that it was described as “not compatible with life” has been struck off the UK medical register.1 It was eventually discovered that Yasser Abdel Rahman, who originally qualified in Egypt, had created a closed loop where contents leaving the stomach could only return to the organ. An expert consulted as part of the proceedings said that the procedure was “not known to man.” Abdel Rahman had joined Oldham General Hospital as a locum consultant general and colorectal surgeon for only a few days before the incident occurred on 25 August 2020. The case concerned a patient—referred to as Patient A—who required an emergency out-of-hours gastrojejunostomy, a procedure that directly connects the stomach to the middle portion of the small intestine, which Abdel Rahman …

A family court judgment holding a doctor responsible for abusing his former partner and barring him from contact with his child may be disclosed to the General Medical Council, the judge overseeing the case has ruled.1 Family court cases in England and Wales are heard in private and the parties are anonymised. Disclosure of information from private family law proceedings may be made only with the court’s express permission. Case law does not show any previous cases involving disclosure to the GMC, the doctors’ regulator. But in taking the decision at the family court in Cardiff to allow disclosure, Judge Adem Muzaffer reviewed earlier cases in which judgments or documents from family cases were allowed to be …

A doctor who prescribed weight loss drugs to a man she met on a dating app has had her suspension from the UK medical register extended after a review.1 Josevania Martins, who runs a private gynaecology and fertility clinic in Hampstead, north London, was suspended for nine months in October 2025, after a medical practitioners tribunal found that she had acted dishonestly in treating the man, by concealing her profession and her role in the prescribing.2 She had also failed to keep proper records of the treatment and had knowingly written false information on prescriptions for semaglutide (as both Ozempic and Wegovy) in December 2023 and February 2024, the tribunal found. The October 2025 tribunal that suspended Martins set a review hearing at the end …

A doctor struck off in 2020 after refusing to attend a hearing at the end of a suspension for plagiarism has been allowed to go back on the UK medical register. Sudip Chowdhury persuaded a tribunal that he has now developed insight and remediated his misconduct.1 At the time a specialist trainee in paediatrics, Chowdhury was found to have submitted work that was not his own in a 2018 assignment for a postgraduate diploma in child health accredited by the University of Leeds. He said that the plagiarism was caused by uploading errors, but he was found guilty by a university investigation. Chowdhury failed to mention the university investigation on a form requiring disclosure that he completed prior to his annual …

The family of a doctor who killed himself within hours of learning that he had been referred to the General Medical Council (GMC) are asking the UK Supreme Court to hear their case for compensation. It comes after a ruling on the case that found the medical regulator did not owe a “duty of care” to doctors it investigates. The case concerns Sridharan Suresh, a consultant anaesthetist who died by suicide in May 2018 just hours after receiving an email from the GMC telling him that he would be called before an interim orders tribunal over an allegation of sexual assault by a 15 year old dental patient.1 Suresh strongly denied the allegation. It was noted that he had given the girl midazolam and fentanyl, which can have hallucinatory side effects. The girl’s description of the perpetrator was also strikingly different from Suresh’s appearance, and the police later dropped the case for lack of evidence. After the allegation Suresh was suspended from work at North Tees …

A consultant gynaecologist who removed two patients’ ovaries without consent faces a new fitness to practise tribunal. This came after a High Court judge ruled that the original tribunal reached conclusions that were wrong and “unjust by reason of serious procedural irregularity.”1 The General Medical Council appealed to the court against a medical practitioners’ tribunal decision in February 2025 that Ali Shokouh-Amiri’s fitness to practise was not impaired and that he should just receive a warning.2 Shokouh-Amiri, who was head of gynaecological oncology at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital in Guernsey at the time of the incidents, admitted removing …

A doctor in Guernsey revealed sensitive confidential medical information about one patient by taking a phone call while examining another patient, it has emerged. The breach of confidentiality was outlined in the latest report from Guernsey’s Office of the Data Protection Authority.1 This case came to light after the healthcare provider that employed the doctor reported the breach to the data protection regulator. The doctor remained in the examination room throughout the conversation, where the identifying details of the patient …

A doctor who was sacked for giving Lucy Letby sensitive patient information has been named following his death. Mark Deakin, a married father of two, was granted lifelong anonymity as a witness at Letby’s trial for the murder and attempted murder of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital. But after an application by Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, the Court of Appeal ruled that he could be named following his death. Deakin, who died in July this year, was the senior registrar in paediatrics at the Countess of Chester Hospital between September 2015 and September 2016. He went on to become a consultant in paediatrics at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool and …

A Bristol GP jailed for damaging petrol pumps in a climate protest has seen his suspension from the UK medical register extended after refusing to concede his actions were wrong. Patrick Hart took part in numerous climate protests before disabling and damaging petrol pumps at an Esso station in Essex with a hammer and paint in 2022. He was sentenced to 12 months in prison for criminal damage in January 2025. While in prison, he was visited by the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst, who condemned the UK’s punitive approach to climate protesters as “blatantly disproportionate.”1 The UN envoy also accused medical regulator the General Medical Council (GMC) of “persecution or harassment of Dr Hart” and “astonishingly paradoxical reasoning” for referring him to the medical practitioners tribunal that would later suspend him. It would be “punishing …

A plastic surgeon who sent his partner two identifiable pictures from his mobile phone of a patient with an open wound has been suspended from the UK medical register for a second time.1 Isa Alalwani sent the images of the patient with a large open leg wound to his then partner in July 2022 to explain why he was busy and not responding to calls. A visual display unit showing patient identifiers could be seen in the images. Alalwani, who qualified from RCSI Medical University of Bahrain in 2013, was …