A SHAMED psychiatrist struck off 13 years ago for groping a female patient has failed in his bid to have his name restored to the medical register – because he has not learned his lesson.
Eighty-four-year-old John Harding Price was banned in 2000 when a General Medical Council (GMC) committee found him guilty of professional misconduct towards three women patients.
He was working as a GP in Lincoln when he forced a teenage girl to sit in her underwear for 30 minutes while he checked her notes.
He also bombarded another woman with suggestive questions and told her she was sexually frustrated.
And he asked a third woman a question of a sexual nature when she complained of a headache at the Grimsby Primary Care Centre in September 1999.
He faced a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) fitness to practise hearing this week to try to get his name restored to the medical register.
The panel found his lack of insight and respect for the regulatory body as well as the amount of time he had been out of practise would undermine the public confidence in the profession if he were allowed to return to practice and refused his application.
Tribunal panel chairman Dr Sarah Jarvis said: "The panel has no evidence to indicate that you have gained any understanding, appreciation or insight into the gravity of your misconduct in 2000 which led to your erasure.
"Instead there has been a continued and repeated pattern of challenging the findings.
"There have been no expressions of remorse and regret.
"Instead you fervently deny any wrong-doing and the panel is not reassured, given your history and almost 13 years' denial of the findings made by the PCC in 2000, that lessons have been learnt and that such events would not occur again.
"You have failed to bring evidence to demonstrate that you are fit to practise."
Harding Price previously failed in an application to be restored to the register in 2007 and has now been suspended from reapplying indefinitely.
Harding Price, representing himself, raised concerns in his opening submissions over the treatment of a Lincoln Partnership NHS trust patient known as Patient E, who died in September 2012.
But the GMC said that case had little to do with his application to be restored to the register, particularly since the panel have no power to go behind previous decisions made by other courts – including the High Court.
Dr Harding Price was warned that criminal proceedings could follow if he had practised as a doctor after he was struck off.
He said: "I think throughout this everyone has known I was not on the GMC register.
"It was published in the press – they took every opportunity to publish it.
"I have never for one moment presented myself as a registered legal practitioner under the GMC.
"People have come to see me and I have said 'look, I am not on the GMC'."
Dr Harding Price is still registered with the Medical Council of Ireland.
ON THE WEB: Read the article printed in the Grimsby Telegraph in 2000, when Dr Harding Price was struck off, at www.thisisgrimsby.co.uk
