A senior General Practitioner in the UK is under investigation after she advised junior doctors from Africa and Asia to try speaking in ‘lyrical’ Scottish or Welsh accents if they wanted jobs in those countries.
Dr Una Coales made her comments in a guidebook for junior doctors sitting for their ‘Clinical Skills Assessments’, which are exams taken in their final year. Coales reportedly caused outrage after she suggested that if gay junior doctors deepened their voices and behaved effeminately around patients, they would stand a better chance of impressing their examiners.
“One candidate was facing a third sitting and yet no one had told him that his mannerisms, gait and speech were too overtly gay. So I advised him to lower and deepen his high-pitched voice and neutralise his body movements,” the Daily Mail quoted Coales, as writing in the guidebook.
She also told women doctors not to wear overly-feminine, flowery dresses, in case patients mistake them for nurses, the paper said. The Royal College of General Practitioners, of which Coales is a senior member, has now launched an inquiry into her comments, which have provoked outrage on the social networking site Twitter.
Coales, who trained in America before becoming a GP in South London, could now be ordered to leave the College, the paper added.
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