by Ciarán O'Rorke March-30-2015 in Healthcare Law
The Supreme Court has upheld a judgment of the High Court quashing a decision by the Medical Council of Ireland to find a Consultant Paediatric Surgeon, Professor Martin Corbally, guilty of poor professional performance (PPP).
The appeal to the Supreme Court turned on the definition of PPP under the Medical Practitioners Act, 2007 ("the 2007 Act"). The determination of this issue would be significant for various professions because that definition is broadly mirrored across various Acts underpinning other professions, including nursing and midwifery, dentistry and pharmacy. Terence Moran of Hayes Solicitors examines the Supreme Court judgments below.
Judge McKechnie rejected the Medical Council’s submission that any lapse, regardless of how trivial, could constitute PPP. He found that the definition of PPP must be read as if qualified by the word “serious” in the same way that the definition of professional misconduct is under the 2007 Act. He was influenced by the fact that a finding of PPP could result in the imposition of the same range of sanctions under the 2007 Act as a finding of professional misconduct. Judge McKechnie agreed that it was not necessary to await repeated incidents of substandard performance.
Judge Hardiman (with whom Judges Dunne and Denham both agreed) also applied a seriousness threshold to PPP and found that only conduct which represented a serious falling short of the expected standards could justify a finding of PPP. Judge Hardiman also had regard to the potential consequences of an adverse finding. He stated that before a medical practitioner could be subjected to “the extremely threatening ordeal of a public hearing” before the Medical Council, there must be reason to believe that what may be proven against him / her is serious.
Judge O’Donnell agreed with both Judge McKechnie and Judge Hardiman that only a serious error or a series of errors (which may therefore be serious) could justify a finding of PPP.
The current position is that a once-off error must be serious to ground a finding of PPP. It is now difficult to distinguish between PPP and professional misconduct under the 2007 Act and it remains to be seen if the legislation will be amended. In the meantime, the threshold for levying allegations of PPP against professionals has certainly been raised and it is to be expected that fewer Fitness to Practise Inquiries will be prosecuted against professionals on this ground.
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About the Author
Ciarán O'Rorke
Ciarán is a consultant in the Healthcare team at Hayes solicitors. Ciarán specialises in medical negligence and has more than 30 years’ experience of acting on behalf of healthcare professionals, doctors and hospitals in medical and dental actions. His experience of complex high value claims includes many of the major brain damaged infant and cerebral palsy cases.