GPhC to hold ‘confidential’ discussions on FtP suicides

The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has revealed it will discuss items normally debated in public, as well as reports of deaths by suicide while under fitness to practise investigation.

According to reports by C+D, the GPhC will discuss several agenda items as “confidential business” at its council meeting this week (July 18), according to council papers published last week (July 12).

The papers listed six items to be discussed in its confidential session – including “racism in pharmacy” and a discussion of an independent culture review of UK regulator the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).

Fitness to Practise Deaths

It is reported that a spokesperson for the GPhC clarified its reasons for placing certain items under confidential business when questioned by C+D.

TYhe C+D reported said:

They said that the NMC discussion had been designated as a confidential item “due to the external context” of possibly negative mentions of the nurses’ regulator – an external organisation.

Last week (July 9), the NMC “apologised and promised action” after an independent review found “safeguarding concerns” and “racism, discrimination and bullying” within the regulator.

According to the NMC, the report noted that the regulator’s “ongoing challenges with the high fitness-to-practise (FtP) caseload” placed its employees “under immense pressure”.

The report found that six people “under, or having concluded, FtP investigation” by the NMC had “died by suicide or suspected suicide” since April 2023.

On July 10, a spokesperson for the GPhC told C+D that the regulator had “noted the report” and would look to “identify any wider learnings or insights”, as would be the case with “any independent reports relating to other regulators”.

However, Lord Justice Bean, said in his ruling:

“… I consider, in agreement with the EAT, that the ET’s decision upholding complaints 1, 4, 5, and 6 was inadequately reasoned and cannot stand. I would therefore dismiss Mr Karim’s appeal, the result is that in accordance with the order of the EAT those four complaints will be remitted for re-hearing before a freshly constituted ET.”

Supplementing this, Lord Justice Underhill (Vice President, Court of Appeal, Civil Division) said:

“I agree that this appeal should be dismissed for the reasons given by Bean LJ. Since the case was not argued before us, or the EAT, on the basis that the evidence before the ET was incapable of supporting a finding of discrimination, it is inevitable, though very regrettable, that the claim – or, rather, those parts of it which the ET upheld – will have to be remitted for re-hearing. But I would encourage the Appellant and those advising him to think carefully about the way in which they formulate his case on remittal, if indeed he decides that he wishes to pursue it. As regards the differences in the treatment of himself and Mr Laniado on which he relies, there appear to have been no specific reasons to infer a racial motivation on the part of the relevant decision-takers beyond the fact he and Mr Laniado are of different ethnic backgrounds. That is no doubt why the statistical evidence discussed by Bean LJ was put at the forefront of the Appellant’s submissions in the ET.

“Although it has not been necessary, or indeed possible, for us to attempt a definitive analysis of that evidence, the questions raised by Bean LJ at paras. 58-61 above show that it cannot be relied on as raising a prima facie case of racial discrimination without a careful consideration of how it sheds light on the reasons for the particular instances of differential treatment of the kind of which the Appellant complains. Simple reliance on headline figures about adverse outcomes is not good enough, at least where the ultimate outcome in his case was a decision that he was not guilty of any misconduct and his essential complaint is about delays in the process.

“Like Bean LJ, I can well understand that the Appellant feels aggrieved by those delays; but what he has to prove in this case, albeit with the benefit of section 136 of the 2010 Act, is that they were caused or significantly contributed to by his race.”

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