Banned, foreign medic who tried to learn northern slang
Somalian doctor’s broken English was impossible to understand, tribunal told
A FOREIGN doctor who claimed he was learning northern dialects such as ‘Scouse’ and ‘Manc’ to help his work has been banned from medicine because of his poor English.
Abdullahi Abdi Yussuf, 51, was first reported to the General Medical Council after a consultant complained he was ‘impossible to understand’.
The Somalian former asylum seeker – who was working as a police doctor – repeatedly failed a series of English tests in listening, reading, writing and speaking.
Dr Yussuf was eventually told he could only return to work if he demonstrated improved language skills. Now, however, after he sent an email in broken English and littered with errors pleading to be allowed to treat patients, Dr Yussuf has been suspended from practising altogether.
The doctor arrived in England in 2003 and claimed asylum. He later completed his medical qualifications in Rome.
The father of nine returned to Somalia but moved back to the UK with his family in 2009 and took up locum junior posts at hospitals in Manchester and Oldham. He was hired as a forensic medical examiner and deployed to police stations to assess suspects in custody.
But in 2013, when attempting to convey a patient’s medical history over the phone for a mental health assessment, the listening doctor
‘Next time I learn accent’
was so confused he asked to speak to the custody sergeant as Dr Yussuf was ‘impossible to understand’.
He failed English tests in 2014 and 2017. The doctor later told a tribunal he had been teaching himself northern dialects like ‘Scouse’, ‘Lanky’ and ‘Manc’ to help patients and colleagues understand him better.
In broken English, he said: ‘I had been living in Manchester then I started a job in Liverpool and they have different accents so for the first month it was difficult to understand but the next time I learn accent.
‘Accents from here to Wigan is different so now I learn everything so I don’t have any concerns or any problems with accent now.’
A panel twice found him guilty of misconduct, but allowed him to carry on working under supervision – on condition he re-sat the exams. He failed twice more.
In an email last November ahead of a further disciplinary hearing, Dr Yussuf said he was back in Somalia helping to treat Covid-19 patients. His heavily misspelt note complained that the General Medical Council had ‘imposed ristraction (sic) of my leicence (sic) to practice because of english language and not my clinical skills and my medical compitance (sic) and I could not work in UK due this stress (sic)’.
He claimed there had been no complaints over his clinical skills.
Ceri Widdett, lawyer for the GMC, told the Manchester hearing that Dr Yussuf had ‘clearly not fully addressed the concerns over the last seven years’. Panel chairman Julia Oakford agreed for a further review next year, saying the tribunal was ‘disappointed’ with the lack of effort Dr Yussuf had put into improving his language issues.
English tests for foreign doctors were introduced in 2014. In the first two years 1,000 doctors failed to reach the minimum standard.
The tests were partly triggered by the death of 70-year-old David Gray in Cambridgeshire at the hands of German GP Daniel Ubani who in 2008 gave his patient ten times the maximum dose of morphine.