Kevel Gumbs
Introduction
Kevel Gumbs is an occupational therapist who was registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) under registration number OT66458. On 13 August 2025, a panel of the Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service (HCPTS) — at the end of a substantive hearing that had run from 11 August — struck him off the register, having accepted his full admissions to an allegation that he dishonestly claimed payment from two councils for overlapping full-time hours over several months, and having found serious misconduct and current impairment on both personal and public grounds. The panel also imposed an interim suspension order of up to 18 months covering the appeal period.
Background Information
The published record identifies Gumbs as an occupational therapist holding HCPC registration OT66458, an experienced practitioner whose record before these events the panel found to be unblemished. The case period found him working full time for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council; the determination window says nothing about his training or earlier career, and this page does not guess at either. MedicWatch — an independent record service that aggregates publicly published decisions of UK healthcare regulators and does not editorialise their findings — carries his case with erasure as the most recent published outcome, and directs readers to the official HCPC register for current registration details.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Regulatory findings, not a criminal case. The findings below come from an HCPTS panel applying the civil standard — the balance of probabilities. They are regulator findings, not criminal convictions, and no criminal proceedings form part of this case. Unusually, the route to them ran through the registrant’s own admissions: the panel accepted Gumbs’s full admissions to the allegation before striking him off.
At the heart of the case were two pay packets for the same hours. Between September 2020 and January 2021, the panel found, Gumbs was working full time for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council while knowingly submitting timesheets for payment at Brent Council covering the same hours — claiming a second council’s money for time he was already being paid to work elsewhere. On top of that running arrangement, he made further overlapping claims on 30 November and 4 December 2020. The allegation charged that this conduct was dishonest, amounted to misconduct, and impaired his fitness to practise.
The mechanism mattered to the panel’s assessment: it found that Gumbs had used a company of which he was the sole director to facilitate the misconduct. In aggravation, it found the dishonesty amounted to a pattern of behaviour, repeated over several months until he was discovered; that it represented a significant breach of trust by an experienced occupational therapist; and that it took place during his professional practice, putting his own interests ahead of his duty to his employers and service users. Accepting his admissions, the panel found the particulars proved.
Against that stood mitigation the panel accepted: an unblemished record before the misconduct, no evidence that the misconduct had been repeated, and limited insight demonstrated in part by his full admissions. But it found the insight limited and the remediation insufficient, with a continuing risk of repetition, and concluded that current impairment was made out on both the personal and public components. Directing that his name be struck off the register, it imposed an interim suspension order of up to 18 months pending the appeal period.
Public Reaction and Consequences
The published record contains no press coverage of the hearing and no public statements from Gumbs or any other party. The concrete consequences are the striking-off direction of 13 August 2025 and the interim suspension order of up to 18 months pending the appeal period. The practical effect is the loss of his HCPC registration and, with it, the ability to practise as an occupational therapist in the UK. The shape of the case — built on a registrant’s own admissions rather than a contested evidential fight — meant the panel’s task was not deciding what happened but deciding what outcome conduct of that kind required; its answer was the most serious sanction available.
Current Status
Gumbs was struck off the HCPC register by the panel’s decision of 13 August 2025, with an interim suspension order in place for up to 18 months while the appeal period runs. His MedicWatch profile records erasure as his most recent published outcome, notes his registration status as not yet verified, and directs readers to the official HCPC register for his current position, including whether the striking-off direction took effect or any appeal was pursued.
Impact on Their Career/Life
Striking off ended Gumbs’s registration and his career as an occupational therapist unless a future restoration application succeeds. The case shows how regulators treat sustained financial dishonesty: not as an isolated lapse but as a pattern — months of double-claiming, routed through a company under his sole control — that the panel judged incompatible with continued registration however unblemished the record before it. It also illustrates the limits of admissions as mitigation: full admissions bought candour and some credit, but not, in the panel’s view, enough insight or remediation to outweigh the need to protect the public. Beyond the determination, the published record contains no information about his circumstances since the decision.