Tommy Haas and David Prinosil, Germany, 7-6 (3), 6-7 (5), 6-3.Sweden 2, Slovakia 1Singles Magnus Norman, Sweden, def Dominik Hrbaty, Slovakia, 3-6, 7-6 (5), 6-3 Karol Kucera, Slovakia, def. Mikael Tillstroem, Sweden, 6-0, 6-2.Doubles Mikael Tillstroem and Nicklas Kulti, Sweden, def Karol Kucera and Dominik Hrbaty, Slovakia, 6-4, 7-6 (4).. The number of doctors charged with serious disciplinary offences by the General Medical Council has more than doubled in a year. The number of doctors charged with serious disciplinary offences by the General Medical Council has more than doubled in a year.
The sharp rise in cases, from 80 in 1998 to 181 in 1999, will be seen as evidence that the GMC, which is under fire from the Government and the public, is clamping down harder on erring doctors.While the “get tough” policy is likely to be welcomed by patients’ organisations, which have accused the GMC of closing ranks to protect doctors, it will alarm doctors who believe they are being made scapegoats for a failing NHS.The sudden leap in the figures, to be presented to a full meeting of the 104-member council today, is being fuelled in part by the rising tide of complaints against doctors to the GMC which have doubled to 3,000 a year since 1995.But the GMC’s screening system, which weeds out the less serious complaints, also referred proportionately more than twice as many cases in 1999 for a full hearing before the Professional Conduct Committee, which has the power to strike a doctor off the register, as in the previous year.In all 31 doctors were struck off in 1999 compared with 22 in 1998. However, twice as many cases were heard in 1999 – 95 compared with 54 in 1998, which was dominated by the long-running Bristol heart babies case – and the conviction rate actually declined to 79 per cent in 1999, from 87 per cent the previous year.The growth in the number of disciplinary hearings has created a huge backlog of 160 cases, one-third of which have been waiting for more than 12 months. In many cases doctors who have been charged with serious professional misconduct continue to work until their cases are heard.Sir Donald Irvine, the president, said the growth in cases was causing delays.

“We know that this is the biggest cause of anxiety for both the public and the profession,” he said.The council is expected to approve a proposal today for a change in the law to allow the appointment of 50 extra non-GMC members to assist with hearing disciplinary cases. If sanctioned by ministers, the GMC plans to use the extra staff to double the number of disciplinary hearings and cut the backlog of cases from 160 to 35. By the end of 2001 no case should wait more than a year, Sir Donald said.The council is also seeking new powers to allow it to suspend doctors temporarily while their cases are waiting to be heard where there is a risk to patients. It was the GMC’s failure to do this in the case of GP Harold Shipman, until after he had been convicted of murdering 15 patients, that made it a target for attack by ministers and the public, but its powers were restricted by a loophole in the law.. Bach, Strauss, Scarlatti – musical history doesn’t lack for examples of sons following in fathers’ footsteps to become composers. “Like father, like daughter” is rather rarer, but that has not deterred Roxanna Panufnik.

She is the daughter of Andrzej Panufnik, who left his native Poland in 1954 to escape the strictures that communism imposed on his music. At first, Britain was hardly more receptive, but by his death in 1991, he had been knighted for his contribution to British musical life. Bach, Strauss, Scarlatti – musical history doesn’t lack for examples of sons following in fathers’ footsteps to become composers. “Like father, like daughter” is rather rarer, but that has not deterred Roxanna Panufnik. She is the daughter of Andrzej Panufnik, who left his native Poland in 1954 to escape the strictures that communism imposed on his music. At first, Britain was hardly more receptive, but by his death in 1991, he had been knighted for his contribution to British musical life.
For Roxanna, born in 1968, a career in music was all but pre-ordained: “Music was around all the time as I was growing up. When I was three, I saw Ida Haendel playing the violin on the TV, and I turned to my mother and said, ‘Mummy, I want a violin with a stick to make it sing!’ The problem was that I didn’t want to play ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’; I wanted to play concertos, now.

I’ve never had the willpower to apply myself to dull tasks like practising. Later I took up the piano, then flute, followed by guitar and harp. The flute and harp really stuck: I started playing all that lovely French music just when the hormones were kicking in. It was perfect.”While the pubescent Panufnik adored French music, her father’s work remains an abiding presence “I always felt at home with his music. It was so much a part of him that when I hear it now, it’s as if he’s there We were very close, almost to the point of telepathy. A couple of years ago I was working on finishing a piece that he’d started just before he died. He’d asked me to complete it, but I was wondering whether I was doing the right thing.

Then one night I had a dream: he was in his studio at home; I looked in, and there were two pianos. He was sitting at one, and he asked me to sit at the other and improvise with him. When I woke up, I knew that he was happy with what I was doing.”She recalls another paternal visitation during the composition of her Westminster Mass, written for Cardinal Basil Hume in 1998: “I was on retreat at Stanbrook Abbey in the Malvern Hills, composing the Kyrie, and I heard his voice say very clearly, ‘Roxanna, clean up your harmonies.’ There were no flashes of lightning or anything, but it was definitely him. I didn’t do what he said, though, just as, when he was alive, he offered me a lot of advice about composing which I ignored quite stubbornly. I regret that now, but I hope I’ve inherited some of his integrity.”Panufnik’s latest work is her biggest yet: her first opera, The Music Programme, which Polish National Opera premiered in Warsaw in April and brings to London later this week.