The Supreme Court has dismissed the Medical Council’s appeal and upheld a High Court order quashing its finding of poor professional performance against paediatric surgeon Professor Martin Corbally and the admonishment imposed on him.
In a judgment delivered on 4 February 2015, Mr Justice Hardiman said a finding of poor professional performance under the Medical Practitioners Act 2007 required a shortcoming of a serious nature. The appeal concerned the legal threshold and the fairness of the process, not a rehearing on the merits of the allegations.
The case arose from surgery at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin on 30 April 2010. The Supreme Court adopted the High Court’s findings that Corbally had correctly diagnosed a child’s upper lip frenulum condition but mistakenly described the proposed procedure in one handwritten note as an “upper lingual frenulum”. The hospital’s booking system recorded the procedure as a tongue tie release, without the upper frenulum detail.
Corbally delegated the procedure to a specialist registrar after being called to attend another patient. The registrar performed an unnecessary lingual frenulum procedure; the child then underwent the intended upper frenulum procedure later that day. The judgment said she recovered fully, after a short period of pain and discomfort, with no ongoing disability. Corbally acknowledged the inaccurate note and apologised to the family.
The Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Committee found three allegations of poor professional performance proved. Five other allegations relating to the procedure were dismissed or discontinued. The Council imposed an admonishment, the least severe available sanction. The High Court quashed both the Council’s sanction decision and the committee’s underlying finding. The Council appealed.
The Supreme Court said the statutory scheme allowed the same sanctions for poor professional performance as for professional misconduct, including cancellation of registration. It held that a serious threshold was therefore required before a practitioner could face a public inquiry and potential professional consequences. The Court also pointed to a procedural concern: the committee had departed from its legal assessor’s advice on the threshold without giving clear and cogent reasons or an opportunity for Corbally’s representatives to address that approach.
The Supreme Court did not decide Corbally’s separate constitutional and European Convention claims. Those claims had been deferred by agreement pending the judicial review proceedings and appeal. The judgment records that the current proceedings addressed whether the committee’s finding and the Council’s decision should be quashed, and that judicial review was not an appeal on the factual merits.