THE consequences of the News & Star’s 2018 expose of fake doctor Zholia Alemi were both swift and far-reaching.

In the days after we exposed her 22-year career as bogus, Cumbria Police launched a fresh fraud investigation that would last for more than three years while NHS health trusts which employed her began their own investigations, while responding to many questions from worried former patients.

The fraudster - formerly employed in a dementia clinic at Workington Community Hospital - left her job after she was prosecuted in 2018 for forging a Keswick pensioner's will to inherit her £1.3m estate.

That prosecution prompted the News & Star to investigate her career - and thus uncover the shocking truth: that Alemi never qualified as a doctor. 

In the resulting second police investigation,detectives spoke to NHS trusts across the country, including in Scotland, Yorkshire, and Norfolk and Suffolk. Despite powerful evidence to the contrary, Alemi denied wrongoing.

But at Manchester Crown Court this week a jury declared her guilty of multiple fraud offences, including forging the primary medical qualifications which allowed her to fool the UK medical regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC).

After apologising for that failure to stop Alemi fraudulently gaining medical registration, GMC officials began the mammoth task of checking the original medical qualifications of more than 3,000 doctors who came to the UK under the same relaxed regime that had been used – and abused – by Alemi.

As they began that work, GMC investigators were aware that the fraudster had achieved consultant status, which meant she was considered senior enough to work with her patients without direct supervision.

She also – again without legal authority – deceived the authorities about her status as an approved practitioner for the task of “sectioning” patients, effectively depriving them of their liberty for the purpose of compulsory treatment.

Yet in reality, she never completed the University of Auckland medical degree she claimed to have, having instead forged both that certificate and the letter of verification that GMC officials accepted as genuine in the mid-1990s.

Before Alemi was charged with posing as a doctor, and immediately after our expose, the GMC spokesman announced an "urgent review” of other overseas trained doctors who gained registration under the earlier checks regime.

She stressed that the route by which Alemi got on to the Medical Register is no longer available. However, officials had begun the task of checking the credentials of UK-based doctors who qualified outside the EU before 1992.

In a statement this week, following Alemi’s fraud conviction for her illegal and unqualified medical practice, a GMC spokeswoman confirmed that checks have been completed on the qualifications of 3,117 doctors who joined the medical register using the same Commonwealth route as Zholia Alemi.

It was confirmed that the primary qualifications of all of these doctors were genuine.

The spokeswoman added: “We also carried out random sampling on a further cohort of 247 international medical graduate doctors who had obtained registration using pathways other than the PLAB route (the current route for joining the UK medical register) for foreign doctors.

From that cohort of doctors, 88 random checks were carried out in total and all of these were appropriately qualified.

The spokeswoman then outlined what she said is the current – and more robust – regime of checking for doctors who qualify overseas.

"We are confident that the robust checks we use now would identify anyone attempting to join the register dishonestly,” she said. A doctor applying for UK registration today in the same scenario would be required to:

·        Have their primary qualification verified with the relevant university by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) – the body that verifies the credentials of healthcare professionals worldwide

·        Sit and pass both parts of Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) test or provide equivalent evidence of their medical knowledge and skills.

·        Provide comprehensive employment history and references for the most recent five years

·        Provide a certificate of good standing from the regulator in each country they had practised in over those five years

The spokeswoman added: “In addition to primary source verification of all medical qualifications, we check all other supporting documentation which applicants provide.”

The News & Star investigation ignited a national debate about the UK’s dependence – which continues even now – on overseas doctors.

Writing for Spectator Magazine in June, 2019, former professor of surgery and NHS consultant surgeon J. Meirion Thomas pointed out: ”Last year, the GMC registered 15,301 new doctors, 8,115 of whom had qualified abroad, mostly from countries outside the European Union, with Pakistan, India and Nigeria topping that list.

“As these figures show, we imported more doctors than we trained…What we know so far may be the tip of the iceberg.

“How many more skeletons are there in Alemi’s cupboard and indeed in the GMC’s? Her clinical career in UK must be thoroughly investigated. How many patients have been harmed or disadvantaged?

“How can these clinical errors be corrected? Somebody needs to be taking more responsibility.”

Commenting this week, the professor said that, between 2016 and 2022, the UK imported 66,732 doctors from abroad.

Una Lane, Director of Registration and Revalidation at the GMC, said: "We are very sorry that Zholia Alemi was able to join our medical register in the 1990s, based on fraudulent documentation, and for any risk arising to patients as a result.

‘Our processes are far stronger now, with rigorous testing in place to make sure those joining the register are fit to work in the UK.

“It is clear that in this case the steps taken almost three decades ago were inadequate. We are confident that, 27 years on, our systems are robust and would identify any fraudulent attempt to join the medical register.”

Police will now seek to strip Alemi of her career earnings - thought to considerably exceed £1m - on the basis that her financial assets are the product of crime. That task will require confirmation of what wealth she has and where it can be found.

The News & Star understands that the fraudster collected Champagne and owns multiple properties, incuding a former church in Warrington which she had bought with a view to redevelopment.

Police have now frozen her financial assets. Currently remanded in custody, she will be sentenced at Manchester Crown Court on February 28.