No Consent Circumcision Verdict Reached
Recently a doctor was suspended for performing a circumcision on a 3 month old boy with no consent from the child’s mother. This has highlighted problems within the regulating bodies.
The GMC Guidelines
Let’s all take a moment to appreciate the General Medical Council for writing this document – Consent: patients and doctors making decisions together
The document is filled with intuitive rules such as:
– Work in partnership with patients.
– Listen to, and respond to, their concerns and preferences.
– Give patients the information they want or need in a way they can understand.
For clarity, The Duties of a Doctor document reinforces that doctors must:
-Respect patients’ right to reach decisions with you about their treatment and care.
-Support patients in caring for themselves to improve and maintain their health.
-Maintaining trust.
-Never abuse your patients’ trust in you or the public’s trust in the profession.
Sticking to the Guidelines?
The GMC guidelines are exactly the type of thing that we want to govern our institutions.
This makes it all the more insulting when they completely undermine their own standards and regulations. With circumcision they have knowingly been doing this for years, and as expected, their weak stance on it has led to a further recent scandal.
They recently gave a paltry 1 month suspension to a doctor who had circumcised a 3 month old baby without consent from the baby’s mother. This seriously undermines the trust in the GMC to treat these cases with fairness and proportion.
Nottinghamshire Police force and the Crown Prosecution Service dropped their charges against the Doctor presumably due to the perceived “lack of public interest” in prosecuting a circumcision with no consent.
Doctor Mehat likely acted without malice and the boy’s grandparents had large shared culpability also, contributing to the reasoning for the CPS to drop charges. But despite this, is 1 month enough? The act contravened all of the above requirements and guidelines for practicing doctors. It was left to the General Medical Council to ensure a proportionate consequence. 1 month of suspension does not add up, seriously damaging the reputation of this institution.
“It’s an absolute joke and I won’t trust another doctor ever again… If I went round and cut his bits off I would be getting years in prison. Even if they struck him off it wouldn’t have been enough punishment, because he has caused my son so much pain, but such a short suspension is a slap in the face. It’s not just my son that’s in pain because of it, it’s just me that’s willing to speak out against it because I didn’t consent to it.” – Victims mother
What Next?
It will be interesting to see how the Professional Standards Authority will react to this blatant failure that the standards the GMC are required to adhere to, or whether the institutions will attempt to brush over this issue despite the growing public pressure from all sides to have reasonable records, standards and regulations surrounding circumcision.
The Professional Standards Authority regulate the GMC and 8 other healthcare providers. They state that their values are a framework for decision-making. Here are the values that they claim to commit to:
– Focused on the public interest
– Independent
– Fair
– Transparent
– Proportionate
Whilst the GMC have been transparent in their decision, it is clear that they are willing to contradict the other four professional standards.
The infants mother claimed that the repercussions are inconsequential as the institutions responsible are “scared to do anything because it’s a religious issue”. The end result is that the practice continues to harm Jews, Muslims, and medical patients due to the impotence of the institutions to oversee good modern health practice. Legislation and practice is vastly outdated.
There has never been a long term followup for circumcision meaning the safety of individual practices cannot be measured. Complaints of patient dissatisfaction are routinely denied. Calls from Jewish and Islamic communities, as well as those against the practice have advocated a regulatory body to govern the practice and ensure reasonable standards.
Ali May – Child Protection Laws
BBC Documentary: ‘A Cut Too Far’ featuring Adnan Sarwar found that the common ground between the Rabbi featured in the documentary, one of the Islamic doctors, and those of us opposing circumcision is that there needs to be regulation, recording and professional oversight.
So far, this call has been ignored.
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