Rose* was in her forties when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s. A period that was already anxiety-ridden and scary was made even worse when, she alleges, her consultant flirted with and sexually abused her.
“On the one hand, he was saving lives,” Rose told me when we first spoke in 2022. “On the other hand, he was ruining lives.”
Rose and I met when my then-colleague Sascha Lavin and I were investigating sexual abuse in healthcare. We found that patients had sexually harassed and assaulted thousands of healthcare staff, that more than 4,100 complaints of sexual abuse made to the police took place in NHS settings, and that the NHS had spent millions on compensation for victims and survivors of sexual harassment, assault and even rape.
When Rose reported her consultant to her GP and the local NHS trust, she faced a wall of disbelief, with lawyers acting on behalf of the trust and the consultant disputing her testimony in a disciplinary hearing and picking holes in her statements.
Get our free Daily Email
Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday.
Sign up now
While the consultant admitted some of her allegations against him, such as his initiating conversations about inappropriate topics, he denied the sexual acts and the hearing found in his favour. Rose received £15,000 in compensation from the NHS trust due to a breach of duty, but the consultant is still practising today.
With the consultant’s alleged abuse of power not classed as a crime under English law, Rose had one more avenue for justice: the General Medical Council, the body that examines the fitness of doctors in the UK to practice, following complaints about misconduct, and can decide to strike them from the medical register, meaning they are unable to practice medicine.
She submitted her first complaint to the GMC in 2001, but felt unsupported by the council and distressed by the thought of having to go through another public hearing. As a result, the complaint never advanced.
She went on to make further complaints about the same incident in 2007 and 2015. On both occasions, the GMC declined to take further action due to a rule that it only routinely investigates allegations of sexual abuse that took place within the past five years.
The council does have the ability to waive the rule at its discretion, and confirmed to openDemocracy that it does investigate incidents from more than five years ago, where there are grave allegations and where it possesses the information it needs to carry out an investigation.
Despite its lack of action, in a 2016 email to Rose, the GMC acknowledged that “were we to look at this matter and apply today’s GMC fitness to practise investigative thresholds to it, we would carry out an investigation”.
The email, which openDemocracy has seen, further stated that her complaint “is considered to be serious enough to warrant an investigation (were we to look at the matter today)”.
“His lying has been abetted first by the NHS, and then by the GMC itself,” Rosa said.
openDemocracy has found that the GMC has rejected ten reports of sexual misconduct due to its five-year rule since May 2022, when Liberal Democrat MP Daisy Cooper raised the issue in Parliament.
Now, victims and survivors like Rose have some good news: the GMC’s regulations are set to change.
Last month, the government confirmed it “agrees” to all recommendations put forward by Lord Mann, whom it appointed to oversee a review of the GMC in autumn 2025. Mann’s recommendations include a proposal to remove “the current rule which prevents regulators from being able to consider fitness to practise concerns involving allegations of historic sexual abuse after five years have passed”.
Cooper, who wrote to then health secretary Sajid Javid about the five-year rule in 2022, told openDemocracy the reform “could be a major breakthrough for women’s safety”.
She added: “I hope after all my campaigning, that victims, predominantly women, don’t have to wait much longer for change. This arbitrary rule has robbed these women from getting justice, and left other patients and staff at risk when perpetrators can not be struck off.”
“The five-year rule is an anomaly,” Rose said. “The police couldn't get away with this excuse to bury cases, the clergy couldn't, the BBC couldn't. The fact that the GMC, and not the other health regulators of lesser mortals, was still allowed to invoke it in 2026 is part of a pattern of caving to the legal and regulatory protection of very powerful males in society who sexually abuse, and the extraordinary lobbying power wielded by medical defence lawyers.
“No argument can be offered to justify this discrimination in favour of more powerful individuals, and of the continued relative leniency in handling senior male doctors over the years,” Rose continued.
Responding to the news, GMC chief executive and registrar Charlie Massey said: “Patients rightly expect assurance that doctors, PAs [physician associates] and AAs [anaesthesia associates] are safe to practise and can be held to account if serious concerns are raised. These proposed reforms will allow us to respond more quickly and flexibly when patient safety is at risk. This is an important and long-awaited step towards a more responsive and compassionate approach to healthcare regulation.”
One of the key issues with the rule is its failure to recognise why a victim may delay coming forward to report sexual abuse, said Lisa Durston, communications manager at the sexual violence charity SARSAS.
“We know that there are many reasons why survivors may not feel able to disclose sexual assault for a long time,” said Durston. “We also know that the small number of survivors who feel able to take the massive step of seeking justice through the criminal justice system, face a re-traumatising process with significant delays and often no positive outcome. It's a real concern that if survivors are turning to alternative routes, they find themselves timed out and thwarted whichever way they turn”.
While lifting the rule is a “great first step”, said Laura Parker, the chief operating officer for Rape Crisis England and Wales, there is more work to do to rebuild survivors’ trust.
“This rule was in place for a long time,” Parker told openDemocracy. “The reporting system was built on a linear, time-limited model that was fundamentally misaligned with trauma-informed practice, and risked excluding survivors from being heard, reinforcing institutional distrust. There are so many reasons why survivors might not report, from fear of not being believed to internalisation of blame and shame, all of which can discourage disclosure. Time limits structurally prevent trauma-informed practice.
“We need an appreciation that reporting and support for survivors is not linear, and that institutional structures that work in a non-trauma-informed way are still a deterrent. Survivors need to know that if they come forward, their complaint will be heard and dealt with in a trauma-informed way, including in a way that recognises why someone may delay disclosing abuse. We also need to recognise that survivors of sexual abuse need specialist support that recognises the realities of the trauma they have endured, which is why specialist services are so important.”
As for Rose, she continues to fight for recognition that she was a victim of a man who she alleges abused his power over her.
*Names changed to protect identity
