Health Secretary Orders Urgent Review After 22 Banned Doctors Found Working in NHS

The Health Secretary has ordered an immediate overhaul of how the NHS vets doctors trained abroad, after an investigation uncovered 22 medics working in British hospitals despite facing serious disciplinary action or outright bans in their home countries. Among them: a doctor who lost his licence for having sex with a patient, another convicted of assault, one evading stalking charges, and a fourth who sexually harassed colleagues. The discovery, made public by The Times through a systematic comparison of GMC records against overseas disciplinary databases, prompted Wes Streeting to describe the situation as "horrific" and "a serious failure in our medical regulatory systems that I will not tolerate."

The investigation's methodology was straightforward enough to underscore how preventable the oversight was. Reporters used a computer programme to cross-reference the names and professional histories of doctors disciplined abroad against the General Medical Council's UK register, then verified matches to confirm they were the same individuals. Much of the information they uncovered was already public—available online to anyone willing to search. Yet somehow, 22 doctors had cleared the GMC's vetting process despite carrying records of misconduct that should have raised immediate red flags.

The regulatory failure operated in two distinct ways. In some cases, overseas medical authorities never informed the GMC that they had taken action against a doctor. In others, the GMC was aware of an overseas sanction but approved the doctor's registration anyway. The General Medical Council acknowledged both scenarios in its response, noting that while it actively shares information with international regulators and receives reports through systems like the physician information exchange, gaps clearly remain. The council also pointed out that doctors applying to register in the UK have a professional obligation to disclose anything that might affect their fitness to practise—a duty that, in these cases, appears not to have been enforced.

Streeting's immediate response was to demand urgent clarification from the GMC about its vetting processes and to instruct NHS England to identify which of these 22 doctors are currently employed and in what capacity. The directive to work with individual NHS trusts to ensure patient and staff safety suggests the scope of the problem extends across multiple hospitals. The health secretary was unequivocal: "No doctor with serious misconduct findings should be able to slip through the cracks and practise in our NHS – no exceptions, no matter where they trained."

The GMC is now reviewing 26 cases total, including one flagged as requiring urgent attention. Of those 26, twenty-five doctors do not currently hold an active licence to practise in the UK, though some may have worked in British hospitals previously. The distinction matters: it means the immediate threat to current patients may be narrower than the full scope of the regulatory failure, but it does not erase the fact that patients were treated by doctors whose serious misconduct records were either hidden or ignored.

The GMC's statement emphasized its historical role in establishing information-sharing systems—it helped create the EU's fitness-to-practise database in 2013—and noted that Brexit severed its direct access to that network. Yet the council also acknowledged that it continues to receive information from overseas regulators through other channels and actively seeks it when doctors with international work histories apply. The implication is clear: the tools exist, but they were not used consistently or thoroughly enough to catch these 22 cases before they entered the NHS workforce.

What happens next remains to be seen. The review Streeting has ordered will likely reshape how the GMC handles applications from internationally trained doctors, and NHS trusts will need to account for any patients who may have been treated by these medics. The investigation has exposed not a single point of failure but a systemic one—a gap between what regulators know, what they share, and what they act on. For patients and staff who encountered these doctors, that gap was never abstract.