A High Court in the United Kingdom has upturned a decision by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service to suspend Dr Ewere Onyekpe, a locum registrar, for six months after he had sex with a patient in Accident&Emergency in June 2020.
The court found that the January 2023 ruling was “fundamentally flawed”, slamming Onyekpe with a one-year suspension. It considered evidence that the woman was vulnerable and taken advantage of by Onyekpe.
He was said to have begun a sexual relationship with the woman while working at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, London, in June 2020.
A hearing in February reconsidered the case. It found that Dr Onyekpe was guilty of misconduct and he was suspended for 12 months.
The tribunal heard that he had given the patient an “intimate examination” after she was brought to the hospital’s A&E on June 5, 2020.
She then gave him her phone number, with a note saying: “In case you want to be friends or anything.” Onyekpe sent the patient a WhatsApp message an hour after she was discharged from A&E and the pair exchanged messages over the coming days.
On June 10, she was brought back to Whittington’s emergency department where she exchanged messages with him for three-and-a-half hours before things got heated and ended in sex in a toilet cubicle.
He was also said to have had sex with her the following day in her home.
