‘Threatening’ doctor who called black workers ‘apes’ is struck off
A DOCTOR has been struck off for a “sustained and repeated pattern of appalling behaviour” including stamping on a colleague’s Dictaphone, calling black agency staff “apes and primates”, and branding elderly patients time-wasters.
Dr Erkan Mutlukan, who worked in NHS hospitals including the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion in Edinburgh, was banned from working in the UK after a string of threatening, rude, and aggressive incidents with staff and patients from April 2013 to March 2015.
The Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal Service (MPTS) concluded Dr Mutlukan, who is now based in the United States, posed a potential danger to patients. It added he continued to consider himself the victim of false and malicious complaints, even dubbing one elderly patient “a xenophobic racist hateful Scottish woman”.
The patient’s daughter told how Dr Mutlukan, a consultant ophthalmologist originally from Turkey, had made herself and her mother feel like “an inconvenience to him” during the consultation in April 2013. She said he complained the opticians who had referred the woman “do this all the time and it was wasting time”.
Later in the consultation, the tribunal heard, Dr Mutlukan banged on a table with such force that it lurched forward and struck the patient, causing her to shout in pain. In evidence, her daughter said: “He then bashed the table again and the whole thing happened again... Most people would say sorry but there was none of that.”
In September 2013, Dr Mutlukan left a female chemist feeling “physically threatened” after cornering her alone following an earlier dispute over a prescription. She said: “He said he was going to report me and get my licence removed... He would not let me speak and he kept telling me not to interrupt him. I felt very nervous and kind of shaky after the incident.”
The tribunal rejected claims by Dr Mutlukan that the chemist was racist and “a known troublemaker”.
Later, while working in southern Wales in June 2014, he unleashed a “torrent of abuse, swearing and aggression” on another consultant for using a Dictaphone while he was making a telephone call.
The ophthalmologist said: “Dr Mutlukan jumped up from his desk and came to the side of me and behind my desk. He caught me by my shirt near my neck and hit the Dictaphone off my hands. The Dictaphone fell on the floor and then he tried to stamp on it... At the same time he was swearing and threatening me. I cannot remember the exact words he used but they were threats of physical violence.”
On another occasion the tribunal heard that the police had to be called after Dr Mutlukan lost his temper with hospital switchboard staff.
The MPTS also concluded Dr Mutlukan had been racially abusive in emails to a black employee at his medical agency, DRC Locums, referring to staff as “dishonest primates and apes”. Dr Mutlukan insisted the references were “non-racial and related only to the sub-human primitive behaviour that was demonstrated by the employees of the agency”. This was rejected by the tribunal.
The watchdog said Dr Mutlukan’s behaviour over the two years had been “shocking and deplorable”, both towards colleagues and to “elderly, frail and vulnerable patients”. It added: “This conduct included the improper use of physical force on one occasion, and racially derogatory language in another. The impact of his behaviour was to cause his victims (patients, doctors and others alike) to be upset, fearful and threatened.”
Dr Mutlukan was erased from the UK medical register. He has until the end of August to appeal.