A Dundee doctor has admitted issuing drugs he had been banned from prescribing.
Dr Dennis Charles Miller told an employment tribunal that at the height of last winter’s snow he had written prescriptions for drugs against a ruling by the General Medical Council.
He said: ”I wasn’t to prescribe class one, two or three drugs. Last year in the snow when the locums couldn’t get in I took the decision to prescribe these for the patients, so Tayside Health Board referred this to the GMC.”
He said that he was meant to get prescriptions approved and signed by another doctor.
Dr Miller, whose Ardler Surgery was shut down by NHS Tayside at the start of August, said the complaint was one of a string the health board had made in the run-up to the closure of his practice.
He said: ”The health board was hounding me from week to week through the GMC. There was no let-up from it.”
Dr Miller was speaking at an employment tribunal review hearing where Jane Thomson, a former nurse at the practice, has accused him of unfair dismissal, breach of contract and sex discrimination.
The case had been due to go to tribunal in September but Dr Miller claimed he had not been able to submit his defence on time.
He told the review he had never received a letter sent by the employment tribunal office in June because at the time the practice was in ”a situation of chaos”.
Practice manager Ann McKenna told the hearing she specifically remembers the letter marked ‘Tribunal’ arriving at the surgery in June, and added that private mail for Dr Miller could sit unopened by him for weeks, if not months.
”I think he was putting blinkers up,” she said.
Employment judge Ian McFatridge will decide whether or not to continue the matter to a full tribunal hearing.