Medical director of Cornwall trust is first to be struck off for management failings

A former medical director at Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust who “naively” accepted assurances from a bungling consultant gynaecologist that he had learnt from his mistakes has been struck off the UK medical register.

A panel of the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service found that Robert Pitcher should have ordered a full investigation and considered restricting Rob Jones’s practice after a damning report by three independent consultants concluded that Jones had “poor clinical judgment and poor surgical technique.”

The case is the first in which a doctor has been erased from the UK register for misconduct in a managerial rather than a clinical capacity. The only other such case to be launched by the General Medical Council, against four doctors who held management positions at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, was dropped in 2013 before reaching a hearing.1

Pitcher was one of …