Pharmacist Roshan Lal, registration number 2023572, who was suspended for 12 months from the professional register last year for committing two sexual assaults, has been struck off after failing to demonstrate enough insight into his offences.

Mr Lal failed to convince the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) that he had fully understood the seriousness of his two assaults on colleagues at a review hearing on March 27.

The GPhC said Mr Lal had made "extremely limited" progress during his 12 month suspension and argued that there was "no realistic prospect" that Mr Lal would benefit from a further suspension period – instead ruling to strike him off the register.

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	The GPhC suspended Mr Lal last March after he was convicted for sexual assaults on two women that left them "terrified" and "shocked".

Mr Lal inappropriately touched a former colleague and forced her against the wall in the first incident, which took place in 2005. Four years later, he lifted the bra of a young female member of staff and touched her breasts during a blood pressure check.

At a criminal hearing in 2011, Mr Lal was given a three-year community order and told to complete a sex offenders' programme.

At his first fitness-to-practise hearing last year, the GPhC ruled Mr Lal had a "startling lack of insight into his actions". The regulator warned it would need independent evidence that Mr Lal had addressed his behaviour before allowing him back on to the professional register.

But at his review hearing last month, the GPhC expressed doubts over allowing Mr Lal to practise as a pharmacist again.

The committee acknowledged that Mr Lal had completed CPD on maintaining sexual boundaries and had previously maintained a "long and unblemished career". In his witness statement, Mr Lal acknowledged that his behaviour had been "totally unacceptable" and he said he took full responsibility for his actions.

Mr Lal had also started attending a sex offenders' programme in November last year. But a report from the programme's organisers said that, while Mr Lal had made "good progress", there was still "a lot of work to do" and they could not yet recommend a return to practice.

The GPhC agreed that Mr Lal was still not ready to practise again. It acknowledged that he had only started the sex offenders' programme four months ago and that the delays were not necessarily his fault.

It also criticised Mr Lal for waiting until last month to see a clinical psychologist, claiming an earlier assessment would have shown "real insight" into his actions and helped his rehabilitation.

The committee concluded he had made "extremely limited progress in the past 12 months, as evidenced by his attitude in delaying an approach to a clinical psychologist, his unfocused approach to training on matters of sexual misconduct and his responses to questioning at the hearing".

It also noted that Mr Lal would be on the sex offenders' register until 2016 and could potentially also be on the barred list for working with children and vulnerable adults, after he failed to follow up on his objection to being included on the list.

The GPhC added: "In March 2012, the original committee took what it considered to be a lenient approach by suspending rather than erasing Mr Lal's name from the register. That was done to give Mr Lal the opportunity to demonstrate that he had made significant strides towards fuly addressing the issues highlighted at the original hearing."

In striking Mr Lal from the register, the GPhC said the original committee had set out the "minimum steps they wished to see completed" by Mr Lal and concluded that he had "fallen considerably short of meeting those requirements".

Mr Lal's representative at the hearing urged the committee to extend the suspension for a further year to enable Mr Lal to gain the "necessary insight and address his offending behaviour", but the committee said there was "no realistic prospect of that being the outcome of any further period of suspension on the basis of the material produced".

Read the transcript of the GPhC's fitness to practice committee here.

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