So far, 56 stories have been published from this project by OCCRP and partners, with more in the works. Its impact is already being felt (see below).
OCCRP’s Research and Data team began work on the project in May this year — and immediately encountered a major problem. Information about licensed doctors in the EU was difficult to obtain, as some licensing authorities have poorly accessible public registries, or no registries at all. Information on banned or suspended doctors was even more scant. What followed was a feat of creative data collection.
“For each country, we needed a list of licensed doctors, and a list of doctors subjected to disciplinary action,” OCCRP data journalist Margaux Farran told OCCRP Weekly.
“The project initially started because one of our partners noticed this pattern [of banned doctors moving jurisdictions] in his country, and wondered if it was possible to search for it on a wider scale. No leaks [were] involved [to begin with] — just a good starting point, a lot of freedom-of-information requests, a bit of data work, a lot of research, and shoe-leather reporting,” she said.
“A researcher from our team started to compile a list of what was available for each country in Europe: Was there a public register of doctors online? In what format? Could we download it or scrape it easily? If it wasn't available, could we file a freedom-of-information request or ask for it through a press request? When all of this failed, we looked at alternative ways. In Germany, we got data about practicing doctors from a commercial website.”
“It wasn't until we were able to run the queries [in the database] that we were able to get proof of concept,” investigative editor Kira Zalan, who led the investigation, told OCCRP Weekly. “We had thousands of potential matches, but then came the next challenge: Would we be able to confirm that the name matches are in fact the same people?” Reporters had to confirm the doctors’ identities, gather documentary proof of their disciplinary cases, and track them down to their new countries, she added.
Even in highly transparent countries, it was surprisingly difficult to find data on this issue.
“For every doctor, we needed to find the reason behind the revocation [of their licenses],” Farran said. “This meant downloading or requesting documents from health authorities, or court documents. In the U.K., such decisions are available online, on the General Medical Council (GMC)'s website. However, decisions older than 10 years are deleted from the website.” Journalists ended up finding a creative workaround, using the Wayback Machine to find the older decisions the GMC had deleted
Zalan said that if it had been possible to get the kind of data and documents reporters obtained from places like the U.K., Norway and Sweden in other European jurisdictions, they would have confirmed “many, many more cases [...] This is why we say it's the tip of the iceberg.”
She now hopes the project leads to reforms that better protect the public at both national and international levels:
“People place so much trust in medical professionals, often at the most vulnerable moments in their lives. And they have an expectation that the officials responsible for licensing these medical professionals have done their due diligence.The failings we've identified seem very solvable if there's political will, and my hope is that our stories create enough pressure to make this issue a priority.”
Going forward, the database will be expanded to include doctors in other parts of the world, with data to be made available to reporters around the globe.
Read more about how the team built a database to help trace banned doctors across borders →
