This week, MP Josh Fenton-Glynn questioned the General Medical Council (GMC)¹ on why between 2018–2025 there were 1,000 reports of sexual misconduct by doctors yet only 53 doctors were suspended or erased from the medical register². The gap between the number of reports and sanctions seems staggering but looking at these numbers in isolation is a mistake; they don’t even begin to tell the full story.
Jan 31, 2026
The context matters
The figures that Fenton-Glynn presented came from Freedom of Information Requests (FOIs)³. At Opening Up, we’ve made several FOIs. They’re not sufficient on their own to understand the issues, and they can be misleading. Some of the questions that have to be asked to interpret the reporting figures:
Were any reports about the same doctor? How many?
Why did the GMC decide not to progress some cases to the Fitness to Practise (FtP)⁴ tribunal?
How many victims⁵ or witnesses withdrew their complaint, and why?
Were the victims in these cases patients, colleagues, or members of the public?
How many of the reported doctors were still awaiting their tribunal hearing?
Crucially, what were the alleged offences?
The type of offence matters
Data from the GMC isn’t always labelled consistently - there are several reasons for this but sometimes it’s because cases are not clear-cut. In fact, very often, cases are complicated.
In our research at Opening Up, there have been instances where we’ve coded a case as a sexual offence (based on a detailed read of the tribunal determination) but the GMC hasn’t. This is related to a bigger and much more complicated issue around how sexual abuse might manifest differently in healthcare contexts. Some behaviour that might not look sexually motivated is, and vice-versa.
In his questions to the GMC, Fenton-Glynn used the terms ‘sexual misconduct,’ ‘abuse,’ and ‘harassment’ interchangeably but they’re not the same. Allegations cover a wide set of behaviours such as sexualised comments, upskirting, rape, child sexual abuse, grooming, asking a patient out on a date etc.
A 2023 survey found that two-thirds of women and one-quarter of men in surgery reported being sexually harassed by colleagues⁶. That means there’s likely to be a significant number of perpetrators. If we suspend or erase every doctor who has sexually harassed someone, we might find that there isn’t much of the workforce left. The extent of the problem suggests it’s not just about individual bad doctors: there’s a wider culture that urgently needs to be fixed.
The real scale of the problem is huge
The actual number of offences and victims will be significantly higher than recorded by the GMC. Reporting behaviour only reflects cases where a victim (or witness):
identified that there was a victim.
knew how to report it.
had the confidence and resolve to report it.
had the mental and physical capacity to report it.
Patients are often in vulnerable circumstances and that reduces the likelihood that all four of those conditions will be met. Usually the most vulnerable patients are targeted, and they can be the least able to report.
Some types of offences aren’t usually reported by the victim. For example, cases related to child sexual abuse material are identified by undercover police. Doctors who’ve been convicted of these offences have sometimes been found to have hundreds of thousands of images and videos of children. There are likely to be vast numbers of victims in the UK and abroad.
Victims of some offences don’t know that they’ve been targeted. That’s the case when the offences include voyeurism or involve unnecessary intimate medical examinations (which a patient might have thought was clinically necessary).
Grooming behaviour can disrupt a victim’s ability to identify that they’re being abused, and it may take a long time for them to recognise themselves as a victim:
“ It may take many years for a patient to be able to pinpoint the source of their problems, or to appreciate that what they experienced constituted abuse⁷” — Professional Standards Authority
Given that many cases like these are only identified by chance, these types of offences are likely to be happening on a more significant scale than has been recognised by regulators and healthcare organisations.
This problem affects everyone
The parliamentary discussion centred on protecting female patients from sexual misconduct and abuse. But this issue:
doesn’t only affect women. Men and children have been targeted by doctors and face significant barriers to identifying and reporting.
doesn’t only affect patients. Staff and other members of the public are targeted too. When children-patients are targeted, their parents/carers are also significantly impacted.
doesn’t only happen on healthcare premises. Offences are committed in other settings too, such as the perpetrator’s home, the victim’s home, and public spaces. Some offences are committed online.
isn’t only an issue with doctors/the GMC. Other healthcare professionals commit sexual misconduct and abuse offences, including paramedics, physiotherapists, nurses, counsellors, etc.
Sanctions don’t solve problems
Often, allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse are hard to prove. In some cases, the victim may already have endured an arduous criminal and/or civil case. These can be gruelling processes that span several years, and require victims to repeat their stories many times over. It wouldn’t be in their best interests - and may be harmful to them - to take a case to tribunal when problems with evidence would mean that a sanction would be unlikely.
Victims deserve to be compensated speedily and fully for the harm they have suffered. They also deserve specialised support services that understand the impact and specific long-term difficulties that doctor-patient offences can cause.
Prevention is better than cure
Most past recommendations from sexual abuse inquiries haven’t been implemented⁸. Sometimes they’ve been vague on the specifics of how to embed changes, the practicalities of implementation, what good practice would look like, and who should be accountable for them.
Opening Up is focused on developing evidence-based interventions that will help detect and prevent sexual misconduct and abuse.
Examples of some interventions that need exploration and testing are:
Overhaul of reporting systems so they are:
Centralised and independent of the employer.
Flexible allowing people to raise a question or concern anonymously or identified, online or offline, informally or formally.
Joined-up- allowing data to be easily shareable between criminal, civil, and tribunal processes so that victims don’t have to keep retelling information.
Transparent- allowing anyone who raises concerns/complaints about a doctor to track the progress of their complaint through an online system.
Awareness campaigns- e.g. educating the public on rights and the specific role of chaperones.
Digital interventions- e.g. developing online consent forms for intimate examinations.
There are many more opportunities to intervene early to prevent abuse- we should take them.
In summary
Sexual misconduct and abuse in healthcare is complicated, hard to identify and difficult for victims to report. It’s not going to be solved by focusing only at the individual level of tribunal sanctions. To develop the full range of evidence-based, specific, targeted interventions required, we need to understand this problem in depth and what’s going on behind the numbers.
Footnotes
‘Health and Social Care Committee Oral evidence: The work of the General Medical Council, HC 1611’, Wednesday 21 January 2026 https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/17070/pdf/
GOV.UK, ‘How to make a freedom of information (FOI) request’, https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request
GMC, ‘Fitness to practise explained’, https://www.gmc-uk.org/concerns/information-for-doctors-under-investigation/fitness-to-practise-explained
The terms ‘victim’, ‘survivor’ and ‘targets’ have been used in other research on the topic of sexual misconduct and abuse. I recognise that there are issues with each of these terms. I have chosen to use ‘victim’ in this article.
Begeny, CT etc. al, ‘Sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape by colleagues in the surgical workforce, and how women and men are living different realities: observational study using NHS population-derived weights’, https://academic.oup.com/bjs/article/110/11/1518/7264733?login=false
Professional Standards Authority, ‘Sexual boundary violations by health professionals: An overview of the published empirical literature’, https://www.professionalstandards.org.uk/publications/clear-sexual-boundaries
Examples of investigations and inquiries include:
- the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (healthcare), https://www.iicsa.org.uk/document/truth-project-thematic-report-child-sexual-abuse-healthcare-contexts.html
- Kerr/Haslam inquiry, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-kerrhaslam-inquiry-report
- Myles Bradbury investigation by Verita, https://www.verita.net/reports/independent-investigation-into-governance-arrangements-in-the-paediatric-haematology-and-oncology-service-at-cambridge-university-hospitals-nhs-foundation-trust-following-the-myles-bradbury-case/
- Peter Green investigation by CHI