A doctor who left his patient under anesthesia to have s*x with a nurse will avoid being banned from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom, according to new reports.
The BBC, The Guardian, and Sky News reported this week that Dr. Suhail Anjum avoided the most serious consequences during a recent Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service hearing about the 2023 incident. During that event, he and a nurse were caught “in a compromising position” by a colleague at Tameside Hospital in Greater Manchester.
While speaking to the medical panel, BBC reported that Dr. Anjum admitted to having sex with the nurse and called the incident “quite shameful.”
“I only have myself to blame,” the doctor, a married father of three, reportedly told the tribunal. “I let down everybody, not just my patient and myself but the trust and how it would look. I let down my colleagues who gave me a lot of respect.”
Dr. Anjum, a consultant anaesthetist, had asked a colleague to watch over his patient after putting them under general anesthesia, saying he needed to use the bathroom. The doctor was gone for about eight minutes when a nurse walked in on him and another nurse alone in a different operating room, putting their clothes back on, according to the BBC.
The colleague told the tribunal that she saw the nurse, who was not named in the hearing, “with her trousers around her knee area with her underwear on display,” while Dr. Anjum appeared to be “tying up the cord of his trousers.”
The patient was reportedly unharmed while Dr. Anjum was away, according to The Guardian.
The doctor was fired from the hospital in February 2024 after an internal investigation into the incident, according to the newspaper, while his family moved to Pakistan. Dr. Anjum told the tribunal that he hopes to continue his medical career in the UK.
The BBC reported that the panel described the incident as “serious misconduct” and said the doctor “put his own interests before those of the patient and his colleagues.” However, the panel said Dr. Anjum was at a “very low risk” of repeating the behavior.
“The tribunal considered that members of the public and the profession would understand the high level of scrutiny Dr. Anjum had been through, and that a finding of serious misconduct would weigh heavily on him,” said Rebecca Miller, the chairwoman of the tribunal, according to the BBC.
“The tribunal was satisfied that this public finding of serious misconduct was enough to maintain public confidence in the profession and proper professional standards, and there was no need to make a finding of impaired fitness to practise for that purpose.”
