update

Hello again. Well there's some good news. I think as a matter of routine, the GDC referred my file to the Independent Safeguarding Authority for assessment as to whether I should be banned from working with vulnerable adults and children. I did not publicise this referral for obvious reasons. Well the ISA will not take action. That's the second regulatory authority which has decided that my behavior was not serious.

The GDC publish their achievement targets on their website. Apparently, they like to finish cases within nine months of referral. They also think that, for the case to come to be assessed by the Investigating Committee, a period of six months is too long and causes distress to the dentist.

Well they took more than four times nine months to deal with me. The Investigating Committee did not assess the case for fourteen months.

postscript

If any of my lawyers or former dental 'colleagues' at DP find my criticism inappropriate, I will withdraw it the moment Mr Crabb, Mr Parsons, Mr Pal and Ms Atkin etc withdraw their clearly stated, consensual and handsomely compensated views.

Cross-examination- barrister Thomas Cosgrove

So here it is, after three and a half years and nearly a quarter of a million pounds spent by the various regulators and indemnifiers. The GDC barrister Tom Cosgrove had an arsenal of written material and staff testimony, and my own 'defence' barrister had just said it was all authentic. I had received little coaching in what to say, and I had to explain how all this evidence had come to be created, without being able to tell the truth about it (that is a lame description. Please read the 'PCT meeting' post for clarification). Remember that the original staff complaint, and the staff testimony, had been prepared jointly, and that the staff had been working together daily for three and a half years- just about enough time to get their story straight. The main points of their complaint were entirely uncorroborated by any one single patient, still less by those tedious details I have seen obtained elsewhere such as times, dates and locations (with the exception of one burp mentioned in one written complaint). The dishonesty of the staff had been discussed at length at the Primary Care Trust, and the written evidence was riddled with at least eight examples of provable dishonesty by named staff members. Mr Holgate had been asked very few penetrating questions as he had never seen my 'unacceptable and wide ranging' behaviour and yet he had told two whoppers on the stand, for proof of which lies there was documentary confirmation. He had previously made a very serious and entirely implausible written accusation of racism in connection with the wallets, one of the main accusations against me. However none of this seemed to trouble the saintly Mr Cosgrove as he went at me as if I was a predatory paedophile. The case was shot through with dishonesty, and if that does not make him (and anyone else who accepted this bullshit on face value ie everyone else in the room (including, at one point, me)) dishonest I don't know what could.

I had some explanation initially but soon ran out. I was having to explain why other people, acting with malice, had chosen to behave in the way that they did and I could not. I had an idea what the phrase 'my mind went blank' meant but had never experienced the feeling repeatedly. All the aggression that I had suffered was being directed at me again one hundred fold as if it had happened yesterday, and I had to go back to my hotel, sleep, and do it again the next day. The memory disgusts me, and the thought of my lawyers sitting there watching me having dumped me in it disgusts me even more.

I changed my story in two significant aspects. The first, that I admitted to being rude and sarcastic to the staff, is of little bearing as they had been making my life a misery and I would have been ashamed if I had done anything else. The second, however, haunts me. Mr Cosgrove had the complaints log in front of him and was making me account for the number of complaints (this is some of  the evidence that was scored through with alterations and duplications). The two consecutive entries that were proof of the foul collusion in the practice- because they were written in the same (anonymous) hand and contained identical language, the chances of which happening innocently being nought- I admitted to be genuine. All the letters and emails I had written, all the travelling I had done and all the money I had spent came to nothing. For three and a half years I had fought my corner successfully more or less alone, and here I was admitting that the evidence incriminated me when it did the opposite. I have thought often about this, and have concluded that at that moment in time, because I could not utilise the correct explanation (thanks again Mr Fortune) I genuinely believed this to be the case. I had been beaten.

Unsurprisingly, after asking me whether I thought it was a good idea to inform patients that their mouths stank of putrefaction and why I was unwilling to fund my patients' dental treatment, the Committee found me not credible and the rest is history.

Barrister Malcolm Fortune

Why I though that, in a politically motivated case such as this one, a defence barrister would ever behave in a way which threatened his own livelihood I have little idea.

Mr Fortune accepted a fictitious story as true. The repeated and ludicrous accusations of racist conduct should have won me the case, and a small fortune. But I trusted someone I did not know, and it has done for me.

The Behaviour of the Staff

I write about this here because I am coming to my cross-examination by Mr Cosgrove, and because it is pertinent to the clinical failures which I have not written about at length- there isn't much to say. On starting work at the practice, it became clear that one particular member of staff had it in for me. Her influence was entirely disproportionate because she worked with the most senior dentist in the practice, who wasn't my employer. I had to work in their dental surgery for an hour each week because it was the only one with disabled access. Her, and the member of staff who I previously identified whose relatives kept attending and kept complaining about me, were the cause of my downfall and were so because between them they-

1. Colluded with patients to generate complaints (cf Shropshire County PCT). Even just one or two a month will escalate into a serious problem.
2. Used a dentist's private login while I was absent from the surgery to write on patient's notes that they were to be transferred.
3. Shouted at a dentist while he was trying to treat patients.
4. Lied to the dentist's employer about the most serious matters of conduct, encompassing everything except fraud and indecency eg the fabricated allegations of physical abuse of chidren, and racism.
5. Lengthy and frequent absences from the surgery while the dentist has a full list of patients (pertinent to the clinical failures).
6. Kept a diary which again contained uncorroborated and entirely false allegations.
7. Somebody (I do not know who) informed 'patients' of the most private information supposedly known only to my employer, concerning previous contact with police and mental health issues. (This is one certain example of god knows what malicious gossip they were spreading in the town).
8. Informed my employer, in the public setting of a dental practice, that I had caused serious harm to patients elsewhere in the practice when no such harm had occurred.
9. Initiated a catastrophic loss of trust between my employer and I by means of the behaviour above. My employer kept a paper trail long enough to hang an army, never mind a dentist whose supposed indemnifiers were more interested in preserving their own reputations than in helping me. The malign influence of these two members of staff turned my employer against me, whereupon the other staff, with whom I had had perfectly satisfactory relations for a year, turned as well.

Each one of these behaviours (except the shouting, because I did not keep substantial records and if I had they wouldn't have been believed anyway) can be verified from the evidence, and the PCT were absolutely certain that the staff were behaving in this way.

So why? If the reader thinks that I provoked them into it, please read the 'some philosophical questions' post again. They certainly weren't asked at the PCC. Were DP unable to understand, or did they take my employer's side because he had paid them more money than I had? Was it not understood that the behaviour above was bullying and intimidation of the most foul nature because I am male and the staff female? If I had been of BME background, would DP, Mr Fortune and the GDC have displayed the same bovine incomprehension in relation to this? I have many more questions, but I must state again the consequences for me-1. Loss of job 2. Loss of livelihood 3. Unbelievable stress and heartache over a period of five years now.

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.

General Dental Council Part 7-the PCC and the Legal Adviser

Among other gems, the Committee Chairwoman Valerie Paterson contrived to attend work in a blouse which was unironed and, while questioning an expert witness, to get his name wrong four times in an hour while reading it from a piece of paper in front of her. Only one member of the Committee ever showed the vaguest signs of engaging with the process in front of him.

In his advice, the 'independent' Legal Adviser Jeffrey Widdup made no mention of the fact that a small but important part of the evidence against me (the complaints log) had like a child's jotter been scrawled through with alterations after the fact. He stated that the uncorroborated complaints should be treated with less gravity than the complaints supported by witnesses. It looked to me that this concession was as easy for him as passing a kidney stone. These complaints included such deviancies as asking patients to pay their debts and 'being about to' commence procedures without checking medical histories (or, sitting in a chair in a dental surgery). The numerous and self-diagnosing suspicious features of this evidence, the cuntish nature of which I and the PCT understood comprehensively within three minutes, apparently eluded him. So we have gone from complaints which would not normally be admitted and which have been denounced as malicious and vexatious by experts to thirty or forty reasonable people who were entirely justified in their negative opinions of me. What a load of balls, and what a useless crock of shit my lawyers were for letting this happen.