A consultant doctor educated in Pakistan has been struck off the UK medical register after a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel found he had concealed 14 previous criminal convictions — including for stalking and threatening to kill — in order to obtain an NHS post. Dr Salah-ud-Din Taj was found to have "intentionally misled" the General Medical Council by falsely declaring he had no prior convictions, raising serious concerns about honesty and patient safety in medical recruitment.

Dr Taj qualified from the University of the Punjab in 1996 and worked as a medical registrar in Australia between 2007 and 2017, where he was convicted of 14 offences committed over four months at the Magistrates' Court of Victoria in Melbourne and given a one-year community correction order with 150 hours of unpaid work. When he applied to work in the UK in 2018, and again when securing a job with North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust a year later, he untruthfully answered "no" to questions about convictions. He later argued the offences were not "serious" enough to declare, that they involved no physical element and no custodial sentence, and that he had been "confused" by the form.