Paula J May
Introduction
Paula J May is a former UK chiropodist and podiatrist whose name was struck from the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) register on 8 December 2023, after a review panel concluded that she remained impaired by an earlier finding that she had dishonestly misrepresented orthoses supplied to a service user. The panel found no evidence of insight, remediation, recent relevant training or reflection, identified a significant risk of repetition, and decided that a further suspension would serve no useful purpose.
Background Information
May practised as a chiropodist and podiatrist, a profession regulated in the United Kingdom by the HCPC, which registers practitioners working with the public across the NHS and private care. Her case reached the regulator through the finding, made at an earlier stage of proceedings, that she had misrepresented orthoses supplied to a service user by describing them as bespoke. The HCPC’s fitness-to-practise process allows panels to review practitioners under sanction at intervals, and her case returned to a panel for review before the December 2023 outcome.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Struck off after a review found no insight into a dishonest misrepresentation about orthoses. The dishonesty finding against May was made by an HCPC panel on the civil standard; the December 2023 review was concerned with whether she remained impaired, and the panel concluded she did. Matters before HCPC panels are regulatory findings, not criminal convictions.
The allegation at the centre of the case was that May misrepresented orthoses supplied to a service user by describing them as bespoke, and that this was dishonest, amounted to misconduct and impaired her fitness to practise. That finding was made against her at an earlier hearing, and the case returned to the panel for review of her current fitness to practise.
At the review, the panel found that her fitness to practise remained impaired on both the personal and the public components. It had before it no evidence of insight, remediation, recent relevant training or reflection, and it found a significant risk of repetition. The panel concluded that the dishonest misrepresentation at the heart of the case remained unresolved and that the safeguards of a further suspension would serve no useful purpose.
Public Reaction and Consequences
The consequence of the review was the end of May’s registration: the panel directed that her name be struck from the HCPC register. In reaching that outcome the panel explicitly reasoned that a further suspension would serve no useful purpose, the step regulators take when a period of suspension has failed to produce the insight and remediation that would make a lesser sanction workable. The determination records that the panel found impairment on both personal grounds — her own unresolved dishonesty — and public grounds, including the standard of conduct expected of a registered podiatrist and public confidence in the profession.
The service user at the centre of the misrepresentation was not named in the published determination, in line with the anonymisation used throughout HCPC proceedings. No separate criminal proceeding arising from the matter appears in the published record.
Current Status
Paula J May was struck off the HCPC register on 8 December 2023. The striking-off order followed the panel’s finding that she remained impaired and that no lesser sanction was workable. Her registration status can be checked on the official HCPC register. The published determination does not record any appeal against the outcome.
Impact on Their Career/Life
A striking-off order removes a practitioner’s legal ability to work under the protected titles of the profession in the UK, and for a podiatrist who had already been through a substantive finding and at least one review without demonstrating remediation, it ends the regulatory path back to practice short of a successful restoration application. The case sits in the portion of HCPC caseload where dishonesty findings — here, a misrepresentation about the nature of goods supplied to a patient — are treated as fundamentally difficult to remediate, and where a panel’s willingness to escalate from suspension to striking off turns on the absence of insight rather than on new clinical failures.