Doctor helped victim he injured in crash

A DOCTOR who drove the car that left his date paralysed in a crash is to keep his job after a tribunal heard he used his medical knowledge to try to help her walk again.

David Rawaf, 28, had been driving the young woman home after dinner at a restaurant when he accelerated away from another vehicle at a set of traffic lights and hit a dip in the road.

His passenger suffered “life-changing” spinal injuries when the medic’s car crashed in Wandsworth, south London, in January last year. She has just started taking steps with assistance.

Last December, Rawaf, who sustained minor head injuries in the accident, was convicted of causing serious injury by dangerous driving and was given a 16-month jail sentence suspended for two years and banned from driving for three years.

But a disciplinary panel at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service imposed no sanction on him after hearing he had visited the woman almost every day to check on her progress and that she had expressed no wish for him to be punished.

Staff at University College London Hospital, where Rawaf is a clinical education fellow in the trauma and orthopaedics department, said he had been liaising with spinal injury experts and studying medical literature for ways to help support the victim’s recovery.

Tribunal chairman Paul Moulder said there was a “public interest” in allowing Dr Rawaf to practise.