HC Deb 13 January 1913 vol 46 cc1675-6
77. Mr. BOOTH

asked the Secretary to the Treasury whether, seeing that the Medical Act, 1858, Section 29, gives the General Medical Council disciplinary powers enabling them to strike off the medical register practitioners who shall be judged by the council to have been guilty of infamous conduct in any professional respect, and that the council have regarded advertising by a medical practitioner as constituting an offence under that Section, he will report to the General Medical Council, with a view to disciplinary action being taken, the names of those practitioners who have entered into signed and stamped contracts with insurance committees to treat insured persons, and who now break their contracts and decline to carry out their legal obligations?

Mr. MASTERMAN

I do not believe that any doctors who have signed an agreement to treat insured persons for three months will break that agreement before the period of the contract, is completed unless they are released from the obligation by the committee with which such an agreement has been made. If they were to take any such action a serious situation would arise. The question of whether such conduct would be infamous in the professional respect would be for the General Medical Council to consider.

Sir PHILIP MAGNUS

Have the insurance committees here entered into a binding agreement with the doctors?

Mr. MASTERMAN

Oh, certainly, and they would not break it without the doctors releasing them from that agreement.