AC-LON-2023-002572 - [2025] EWHC 2324 (Admin)

The appellant submits that the Panel was wrong to make the findings it did on the facts, and on misconduct and impairment. The Grounds put it in this way at para 2:

“A [the appellant] asks the Court to set aside the decision entirely on the basis of serious procedural irregularity/unfairness and to order a re-hearing of the matter. If the hearing should not have proceeded in A’s absence (even though A missed only 2 days of the hearing) then the hearing was invalid as a whole and any decisions arising from it must be set aside and a re-hearing arranged.”

This submission depends on the adjournment decision being flawed. It is not. It was not a serious procedural irregularity, not did it produce unfairness. Therefore, the condition precedent for this ground fails. However, at the hearing the appellant sought to criticise the substance of the findings of fact made by the Panel. This was not part of the Grounds. Nevertheless, the various factual matters she wished to raise without any notice to the court or the respondent amounted to an evidential re-running of the disciplinary hearing by reopening the Panel’s findings. The proper approach to this is settled in law.

The appeal court will interfere with findings of primary fact in limited and defined circumstances, as helpfully summarised by Morris J in Byrnev GMC [2021] EWHC (Admin) 2237 (“Byrne”) at para 15:

“where “any advantage enjoyed by the trial judge by reason of having seen and heard the witnesses could not be sufficient to explain or justify the trial judge’s conclusions”: per Lord Thankerton in Thomas v Thomas approved in Gupta;

- findings “sufficiently out of the tune with the evidence to indicate with reasonable certainty that the evidence had been misread” per Lord Hailsham in Libman;

- findings “plainly wrong or so out of tune with the evidence properly read as to be unreasonable”: per in Casey at §6 and Warby J (as he then was) in Dutta at §21(7);

where there is “no evidence to support a … finding of fact or the trial judge’s finding was one which no reasonable judge could have reached”: per Lord Briggs in Perry after analysis of McGraddie and Henderson.”

The approach to fact-finding was also summarised by Cranston J in Yassin v GMC [2015] EWHC 2955 (Admin) (“Yassin”) at para 32:

“ iii) The Panel has the benefit of hearing and seeing the witnesses on both sides, which the Court of Appeal does not;

Although the appellant told this court that “all the allegations are untrue”, nothing said by her comes close to being sufficient to cast doubt on the findings of fact of the Panel. The findings relied on an assessment of credibility. As such they are “virtually unassailable” as Leveson LJ put it. It is noteworthy that the appellant did not give evidence on her own behalf at the disciplinary hearing. She sought to give an oral account and not be cross-examined. The Panel understandably refused such an imbalanced distortion of proper procedure. When she was asked by this court why she took such a stance, she stated that she “did not understand what being on oath means”. This is highly improbable. By the time she had the opportunity to give evidence, she had been in the hearing for several days and had seen other witnesses giving evidence on oath. Indeed, she had questioned some of them.

As to the finding of misconduct, I have read carefully the Panel’s analysis of why its findings of fact amounted to a falling seriously short of the professional standard required. Once the findings of fact were made, the finding of misconduct was a reasonable and rational consequence of those highly adverse findings.

Having properly and rationally found misconduct, impairment of fitness to practise was plainly made out. Her actions placed vulnerable patients at risk of harm; the dishonesty findings were clearly “extremely serious”; her insight was limited (“extremely limited”); the breaches of the conditions of practice order, designed to regulate her to protect the public, were deliberate, and showed disregard for the regulator, professional regulation and revealed a deep-seated attitudinal problem. There was no evidence that the risk of repetition was or was sufficiently reduced.