Danny Coyle - Bloodgate doc is guilty

The only thing more unedifying than the admission of guilt by a qualified doctor of cutting a player's lip to falsify an injury is the wailing from the gin and tonic set about the whole sordid affair being dredged up again.

Not Bloodgate again, they've been moaning. Wasn't that all dealt with last year? In rugby terms, sort of, but this week's hearing at the General Medical Council is nothing to do with rugby.

A doctor is up before her peers because she broke a cardinal rule of her profession. Now, there may be a case for the defence in the claims that she was put under intolerable pressure in a heat of the moment situation by a player she was friendly with, desperate to cover his own backside having suspected the game was up.

That kind of scenario must bring with it a pressure most people would crumble under, but as the basis for a plea for leniency, it starts to look flaky when you realise that Wendy Chapman's chosen career path was that of accident and emergency consultant.

It takes a number of years to reach that level. In all that time in one of the most fraught areas of medicine, can she honestly never recall a time when the pressure has become so much her head has felt like it would explode at the sheer enormity of decisions she has had to make amidst the chaos of a casualty ward?

Would the simpering begging of a privileged young man who plays a game for a living, who has just blatantly cheated, come anywhere close to the life and death nature of Wendy Chapman's day job? Apparently it did, and Chapman crossed a line no doctor should ever dare to breach.

There is sympathy for her, of course, because she made a dreadful error and she no doubt regrets the moment she took a blade to Tom William's mouth. Does she deserve to rebuild her life peacefully? Absolutely.

But as doctor, she has proven to have flawed judgement under pressure, and I'm not sure next time I need urgent assistance in A & E that I'd be too happy if someone with that on their record was tending to me.

I suspect none of those who'd rather this story was buried would either, which they might care to remember before their next bout of whinging.

READ DANNY COYLE EVERY WEEK AT RUGBY.CO.UK

Date published : 26 Aug 2010 - 09:34:56