About | MPTS Tribunal Analysis

What is this?

This dashboard analyzes Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) hearings to explore potential patterns in how doctors from different ethnic backgrounds are represented in tribunal proceedings.

The MPTS is responsible for investigating fitness to practise concerns about doctors in the UK. This project collects publicly available tribunal data and categorizes cases by inferred ethnicity, allegation type, and outcome.

Data Source

All data is scraped from the MPTS public hearings database. This includes:

Doctor names and registration details
Hearing dates and venues
Allegation categories and descriptions
Tribunal outcomes and determinations
Primary Medical Qualification (PMQ) country

The data is refreshed periodically to include new hearings.

Methodology

Ethnicity is inferred using multiple signals, as it is not directly recorded in MPTS data:

Primary Medical Qualification (PMQ) country — Where the doctor obtained their medical degree (strongest signal)
Name pattern matching — Surname and first name patterns associated with specific ethnic backgrounds
Confidence weighting — PMQ-based classification takes priority over name-based inference

The classification assigns each case to a single ethnic category. This is a simplification — individuals may have mixed heritage or not fit neatly into categories.

Limitations

This analysis has significant limitations and should be interpreted with caution.

Inferred ethnicity is not self-reported — Misclassifications are inevitable
Name-based classification is imprecise — Names can be shared across ethnicities, changed through marriage, anglicized, etc.
Sample size varies — Some ethnic categories have very few cases, making statistical comparisons unreliable
Confounding factors — Differences in representation may reflect factors other than bias (specialty distribution, career stage, referral patterns)
"Unknown" category — Cases where ethnicity could not be inferred are excluded from percentage calculations

Representation Ratios

The dashboard can show over/under representation ratios comparing tribunal appearances to workforce composition:

Ratio = 1.0 — Proportional representation (tribunal % equals workforce %)
Ratio > 1.0 — Overrepresented in tribunals relative to workforce
Ratio < 1.0 — Underrepresented in tribunals relative to workforce

Workforce baseline data is sourced from GMC and NHS statistics on the ethnic composition of UK doctors.

Purpose

This project exists to support academic research and public transparency regarding potential disparities in medical tribunal outcomes.

Previous research has suggested that doctors from ethnic minority backgrounds may face higher rates of referral to fitness to practise proceedings. This dashboard aims to make the publicly available MPTS data more accessible for analysis.

This is not an accusation of bias. Disparities in representation may have many explanations. The goal is to surface the data for further investigation.

Sources & References

Contact

This project is part of databased, a collection of data analysis projects.

For questions or feedback, please open an issue on the project repository.