When your medic is a fake

County View
John Healy

The recent RTÉ expose of the fake psychologist who posed as an expert adviser to the HSE, but whose qualifications were shown to be totally bogus, is nothing new in the narrative of health delivery in Ireland. Caroline Goldsmith was not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to con her way past the recruitment gatekeepers who should have known better.
Goldsmith was engaged by Tusla as a world renowned authority in the field of autism. She was hired through a recruitment agency on the basis of a CV that proclaimed her to have, among other qualifications, a Master’s degree and a Doctorate in clinical psychology. But, as the RTÉ researcher was to find out, all of her awards could be bought online by simply filling in a few forms and sending off the required fee.

Apart from highlighting how flimsy is the regulatory framework by which so-called medical experts are allowed to practice, the expose raised serious doubts about the screening process employed by the HSE before somebody is allowed loose to offer services to the public.
It is only a few short years since the colourful story emerged of the expert witness who was giving evidence at a Circuit Court hearing in the south of the country. The man was something of an acknowledged expert in the field of psychiatry, and his reports were generally accepted by the courts without question in matters of family law. It so happened that on this particular occasion he was waxing eloquent to the court as the clock approached lunchtime. A cross examining barrister, sensing something amiss, indicated that he would like to check out the expert’s credentials in a little more detail. The presiding judge, calling the lunchtime adjournment, suggested that the matter would be addressed on resumption.

But when the court re-assembled, there was no sign of the expert witness. As the minutes ticked by, and the witness chair remained unoccupied, it became obvious that the expert would not be returning. His cover, as they say, had been blown; he was no more an expert than was the court usher. Not surprisingly, he was never heard of again in judicial circles.

At Cork Circuit Court, a young second-year law student was jailed for six years having set himself up as a paediatrician and practising as a senior medic at the Mater Hospital. Nobody could explain to the incredulous judge quite how such an obvious imposter had managed to talk his way into a top hospital consultancy.
In one of many British cases, a fraudulent doctor of Eastern origin was found to have worked for 20 years with the NHS, earning over £1 million during his career. Nobody had even noticed that, in his forged letter of verification, the word ‘verify’ had been repeatedly misspelled as ‘varify’.
Too often, charlatans are allowed to prey on the vulnerable and the desperate simply because the regulations are too lax. When Prime Time investigated the behaviour of an individual who was offering radical cancer therapy in county Clare, it found that he had been struck off the medical register in California. But because he made no claim to be registered in Ireland, the Medical Council was powerless to sanction his activities.
And where, as has often happened in Britain, an overseas doctor has raised the suspicions of colleagues, there is a marked hesitancy to bring things to a head. The tendency is to dismiss unusual or unorthodox conduct as a cultural anomaly, or as the product of non-British conventional medical training. And British doctors acknowledge a reluctance to call out what they are often doubtful about, all the more so should their actions be met with the accusation of racism as the first line of defence.