How to… Access MPTS Data
Initially, based on our reading of other relevant publications (e.g. 1), we had thought it might be best to approach the Professional Standards Association (PSA) regarding the data they hold on doctors’ sexual misconduct. Although the PSA have been very supportive to the project, they intimated that the General Medical Council (GMC) may hold more detailed data for our purposes. Therefore, liaising with our contact at the GMC, we filled in a form for external data requests to the GMC. This laid out: the aims and scope of our project, and what we were then requesting from the GMC, namely: what data is collected on sexual misconduct; how detailed the data is that they would be comfortable sharing; and advice as to the level of access we would be afforded (e.g. whether we could access this data remotely, or only on-site).
The GMC was the first regulator that we approached, and thus, these conversations have shaped our data collection strategy with other regulators. For example, the level of granularity of data that the GMC was comfortable sharing led to us requesting aggregate data in the form of contingency tables, rather than row-by-row, and this request has then been replicated across other regulators. Once we had reached an agreement with the GMC, we drew up a data sharing agreement, and a secure file transfer service was used to share the data requested.
© Emma Yapp for the Powerful Perpetrators project, 2026.