Background
Dr Sridharan Suresh, a consultant anaesthetist with an exemplary professional record, became the subject of a police investigation after an allegation of sexual assault involving a teenage patient. He denied the allegation. The police notified the General Medical Council, which opened a fitness-to-practise investigation and referred the matter to an Interim Orders Tribunal.
On 2 May 2018, the GMC emailed Dr Suresh notifying him of the investigation, the interim-orders referral and requests for information about his work. He took his own life later that day. His widow and children sued the GMC in negligence and under the Human Rights Act 1998, alleging that its acts and omissions caused or contributed to his death. The High Court struck out or summarily dismissed the claims, holding that the GMC owed no relevant common-law duty of care. The family appealed only the negligence ruling; the dismissal of the human-rights claim was not appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal and upheld the termination of the negligence claim. It held that the GMC did not owe Dr Suresh a duty of care concerning the timing, manner or content of its notification, or the welfare-related inquiries and precautions that the family alleged should have preceded it. Recognising such a duty could conflict with the GMC’s statutory obligation to investigate fitness-to-practise concerns in pursuit of its overriding objective of protecting the public.
The court rejected the argument that the Supreme Court’s public-authority negligence cases required the statutory context to be disregarded initially merely because sending the notification was a positive act capable of making matters worse. It also found no assumption of responsibility by the GMC and no basis for treating the regulator as having created or controlled a source of danger in a way that generated the asserted duty. Because the pleaded negligence claim failed on duty of care, it could not proceed to trial, irrespective of the separate question whether psychiatric injury or suicide was reasonably foreseeable.
Key Takeaways
- A statutory regulator does not necessarily owe a private-law duty of care to a person under investigation merely because it takes the positive step of notifying that person.
- Courts may consider the governing statutory scheme directly when deciding whether a negligence duty exists; they need not first analyze the position as though the statutory context did not exist.
- A duty that could place an investigated practitioner’s interests in conflict with the GMC’s public-protection functions will not be recognized absent an established basis such as an assumption of responsibility.
Why It Matters
The decision clarifies the limits of negligence liability for the GMC and potentially other statutory regulators and investigating authorities. Even where regulatory communications may foreseeably cause severe distress, the existence of harm or foreseeability does not by itself establish a duty of care.
The judgment does not minimize the need for regulators to address practitioner welfare, and the GMC implemented procedural changes following the coroner’s recommendations. It holds, however, that those welfare concerns did not create the private-law duty alleged in this case.