'Bloodgate' doctor loses hearing with GMC
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Your support makes all the difference.The match-day doctor at the centre of the "Bloodgate" saga said yesterday she would "deeply like" to return to medicine, but conceded it would be difficult to find work. Dr Wendy Chapman said her name would for ever be linked with her part in the scandal in which she cut a player's lip to cover up his bogus injury.
Tom Williams' supposed injury meant a specialist kicker could come on to the pitch for Harlequins in the dying minutes of last April's Heineken Cup quarter-final tie against Leinster.
Appearing before the General Medical Council, Chapman said that before "Bloodgate" she had been hoping to take a fuller role at the club and was in line to work in some capacity at the London 2012 Olympic Games.
She told a fitness-to-practise panel that, although she had received support since from "various people" at Harlequins, it had been "made plain to her" that she would never work for them again. Chapman previously said she was "ashamed" that she had given in to pressure from Williams, who wanted to conceal that, minutes earlier, he had bitten into a fake-blood capsule.
She admitted almost all the charges levelled against her by the GMC, which said her conduct on the match day, and at a later European Rugby Cup (ERC) disciplinary hearing, was likely to bring the profession into disrepute and was dishonest. Yesterday, the panel found all the facts against her proved apart from an allegation that she had stated that Williams had a loose tooth in order to deceive others that he had sustained an injury on the field of play.
Chapman is currently suspended from practising medicine pending the outcome of the hearing in which she could be struck off.
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