A GP assumed another identity in an attempt to collect a prescription. Dr Callum Metcalfe, who worked at a surgery in Gwynedd, has been suspended from medical work after a series of deceptions.
Dr Metcalfe qualified from the University of Manchester in 2019 before becoming a GP registrar at the Bron Meirion practice in Penrhyndeudraeth. A medical tribunal panel heard he went to the Tesco pharmacy in Bangor on January 2, 2022, and presented a prescription which he claimed was from an A&E department.
Posing as a patient, he told the pharmacist that he did not know the prescriber. But he then contradicted himself by describing the prescriber as an “old friend”. Dr Metcalfe told the pharmacist his friend had written the prescription to help him because GP surgeries were closed over Christmas.
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Later that day, Dr Metcalfe rang the pharmacy and spoke to an employee. This time using his true identity, he told the dispenser he had written the prescription for a friend. He claimed he had tried to help his friend because it was “hard to get hold of a doctor during the holiday period.”
Dr Metcalfe lied that the “friend” who had turned up at the pharmacy was simply trying to protect him by pretending not to know him. But it later emerged that Dr Metcalfe and the man who tried to collect the prescription were the same person. The GP admitted that he had been trying to obtain the medication for his own use, that he had falsely presented himself as a patient, and that the prescription was not from A&E. The type of medication has not been disclosed in the public record of the tribunal.
The tribunal also heard he had been convicted in September 2023 at Caernarfon Magistrates’ Court of being in charge of a motor vehicle while above the alcohol limit. Following a ten-day hearing the panel, led by Claire Lindley, found that Dr Metcalfe’s fitness to practise was impaired. They suspended him from the medical practitioners register for five months. A review hearing will take place in the coming months to decide whether the GP can return to work.