General Dental Council Part 8- the Health evidence

We had arranged that a consultant psychiatrist attend to try to explain why I had behaved in the way that I had. This again stemmed from my team's dismal inability to understand what had occurred. The conduct could be narrowed down to- breaking wind and burping, flicking the V's, swearing and making negative comments about people. The false connection which the prosecution made largely unchallenged was that the patients had been affected by any of this. The one behaviour- the wallet-opening- which the patients must have been aware of was mentioned in one line of documentation from Green End, despite the scrutiny I was under and the huge volume of contemporaneous observations kept by Mr Holgate. The patients were presented as a mass of sufferers adversely affected by this behaviour and yet not one testified to it (plus it was virtually absent from the written complaints- I can remember one complaint which mentioned that I had burped). So we had a group of staff saying that they had observed inappropriate behaviour in respect of patients, yet the two other people in the room at the time- the patient and I- did not confirm any of it. Madness.

The problem with the Health evidence was that I was damned if I used it and damned if I didn't. The particular problem with using it was that my alcohol use and 'recreational activities' (which had ceased six years previously), which I had successfully concealed from the GDC for twelve years, were voluntarily and in detailed form revealed and this particular evidence did not go down well at all.