A doctor who prepared foreign medical graduates to pass a UK test of clinical competence has been struck off the medical register after a tribunal found that he had obtained and passed on to his students confidential information about the test questions, giving them an unfair advantage.
Nikhilesh Vardhineni, who qualified and worked briefly in India before obtaining an MD at the University of Buckingham in 2017, had himself taken the test—administered by the General Medical Council’s Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB)—three times.
Each time he had signed a confidentiality agreement promising not to share details of scenarios in the “PLAB 2” tests, in which the applicant is asked to propose diagnosis and treatment of an actor or manikin on the basis of the provided symptoms and history. But a teaching folder …