A fake doctor who used forged documents to practice psychiatry in the UK’s national healthcare system for two decades has been jailed and ordered to pay back hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Born in Iran, Zholia Alemi and her family emigrated to Auckland, New Zealand, in the early 1990s. There, she failed to secure the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees required to work as a qualified doctor, but she didn’t let that stop her from fulfilling her dream. In the mid-90s, she moved to the UK, where she took advantage of a legal loophole that allowed Commonwealth doctors to practise without additional examinations. Normally, doctors who obtain their degrees overseas have to take the PLAB (Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board) test, but Alemi was able to bypass it using paperwork forged in the UK. She then went on to practice psychiatry all over the UK for about 20 years.
Alemi had little regard for patient welfare. She used forged New Zealand medical qualifications to obtain employment as an NHS psychiatrist for 20 years,” Adrian Foster of the Crown Prosecution Service said. “In doing so, she must have treated hundreds of patients when she was unqualified to do so, potentially putting those patients at risk.”
The fake doctor‘s luck came to an end in 2018, when she was found guilty of forging the will of an 84-year-old woman in order to inherit her home, worth £300,000. This led prosecutors down a rabbit hole of forgeries and fraud. She was jailed for five years after being found guilty on three counts of fraud, and subsequent revelations only extended her sentence. She was recently ordered to pay back more than £400,000 or face more jail time.
Prosecutors claim that Alemi earned more than £1.2m over more than 20 years in the UK’s National Health Service and put the lives of her unknowing patients at risk. They also warned that the loophole used by Zholia Alemi to practice medicine without any testing could have been used by other fraudsters. Following this case, the UK’s General Medical Council launched a major review of around 3,000 overseas doctors’ licences issued in the 1990s.
