- Tuesday, November 28, 2023
According to the High Court, the tribunal did not properly consider Dr Sawati’s case.
By: Pramod Thomas
A medical tribunal has ordered to restore the licence of a doctor, who was struck off for leaving a busy A&E ward to take a nap, according to reports. It ordered to suspend her for six months instead.
Dr Raisah Sawati, 33, from Glasgow, Scotland, was removed from service by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) last year. Later, the High Court ruled her punishment was too harsh.
Swati was found snoozing on a bench in the changing rooms wrapped in a blanket by colleagues. She was missing from A&E at Fairfield Hospital, Lancashire.
The medic argued she slept as she had period pain, Sawati was found guilty of misconduct, dishonesty and deficient professional performance.
Reports said that the doctor had been reported to the tribunal for many alleged incidents since 2015.
In her first community placement, she failed to discuss symptoms with a patient who later died. But she changed notes to make it seem she cared for the patient.
While working at Manchester Royal Infirmary in January 2015 she was found lying on a bed with lights off after asking to leave the main theatre block.
Upon hearing, the original tribunal decided to remove her from the service. But the High Court threw out the tribunal’s decision in February and ordered a new tribunal.
According to the High Court, the tribunal did not properly consider Dr Sawati’s case. The judge ruled that using a defendant’s claim of innocence as proof of their dishonesty was ‘Kafkaesque’.
“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,” High Court Justice Rowena Collins Rice was quoted as saying by MailOnline.
“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.”
