HCPC Struck Off Rates by Profession: Which Registrants Face the Harshest Outcomes?
The HCPC regulates over 300,000 professionals across 15 disciplines. When a registrant faces a fitness to practise hearing, the outcomes range from no further action to the hardest sanction available: striking off the register.
But the risk is not evenly spread. Our analysis of 2,894 HCPC fitness to practise hearings shows striking variation in struck-off rates between professions. Some of the gaps are larger than most practitioners realise.
Struck-off rates by profession
| Profession | Struck Off | Total Hearings | Struck-Off Rate | |---|---|---|---| | Biomedical scientist | 29 | 149 | 19.5% | | Operating department practitioner | 51 | 283 | 18.0% | | Chiropodist / podiatrist | 14 | 76 | 18.4% | | Hearing aid dispenser | 6 | 35 | 17.1% | | Speech and language therapist | 10 | 63 | 15.9% | | Adult nurse | 35 | 276 | 12.7% | | Practitioner psychologist | 15 | 126 | 11.9% | | Paramedic | 101 | 878 | 11.5% | | Physiotherapist | 52 | 506 | 10.3% | | Occupational therapist | 26 | 273 | 9.5% | | Radiographer | 33 | 388 | 8.5% |
The professions at greatest risk
Biomedical scientists top the table at 19.5%, nearly one in five hearings ending in removal. Chiropodists sit just below at 18.4%, with operating department practitioners close behind at 18.0%.
Radiographers (8.5%) and occupational therapists (9.5%) sit at the other end. The spread is substantial: a biomedical scientist is more than twice as likely to be struck off as a radiographer facing the same regulator. That is a significant difference and warrants explanation.
Why the variation?
Allegation type matters more than profession. The most common HCPC allegation categories across all professions are record keeping (417 cases), clinical competence (412), dishonesty (320), and boundary violations (315). Professions where dishonesty or boundary violation cases make up a higher share of hearings tend to see harsher outcomes. Those allegation types go to the core of professional trust, and panels treat them differently.
Panels weigh public protection risk. The proportionality test for sanctions turns on whether the registrant poses a continuing risk. In theatres and other high-acuity settings, panels appear to apply that test more stringently. That probably explains the ODP rate, though with 283 hearings the sample is large enough to have some confidence in the figure.
Volume affects reliability. Paramedics are the largest single group in the dataset (878 hearings), which makes their 11.5% rate the most statistically robust figure in the table. Hearing aid dispensers, at only 35 hearings, are a different story. A handful of outcomes either way shifts that percentage considerably. Treat the smaller professions as indicative, not definitive.
Engagement is the single strongest predictor. Across every profession, registrants who do not engage with the fitness to practise process face a struck-off rate of 29.8%. Those who do engage: 15.5%. That gap holds regardless of profession, allegation type, or prior history. Non-engagement is not just bad tactics, it is close to a guaranteed worse outcome.
What panels actually cite
The most commonly recorded mitigating factors in our dataset:
- No previous fitness to practise findings (cited in 58 cases)
- Self-referral (25 cases)
- Genuine remorse (19 cases)
- Good character references (14 cases)
- Isolated incident (8 cases)
And the aggravating factors that drive the harshest outcomes:
- Abuse of position (38 cases)
- No remediation (36 cases)
- Lack of insight (34 cases)
- Non-engagement (13 cases)
The combination of engagement and remorse is worth paying attention to. When a registrant does both, struck-off rates fall well below the profession averages in the table above. These are not independent variables. Panels read them together.
A note on what these numbers mean
An 11.5% struck-off rate for paramedics does not mean any given paramedic has an 11.5% chance of being struck off. It means that of all paramedic hearings in this dataset, roughly one in nine resulted in removal. The actual risk for any individual depends on the allegation, the strength of mitigation, and how the registrant engages with the process.
These are population-level figures. They are useful for understanding the landscape and identifying patterns. They are not a substitute for case-specific analysis.
Search the full dataset
These figures come from TribDB's database of 4,044 professional regulator fitness to practise hearings across the HCPC, NMC, GDC, and GOC. Every hearing is searchable by profession, allegation type, outcome, and keyword.
Search 4,000+ fitness to practise hearings at tribdb.uk/regulators
Data sourced from publicly available HCPC fitness to practise hearing records. All figures based on 2,894 HCPC hearings in the TribDB database as of April 2026.