A CONTROVERSIAL doctor from Bolton is set to appear before his professional watchdog for a third time - to answer claims he wrongly gave out medication to three patients.

Dr Simon Caswell is also being probed over an allegation he failed to admit a patient to hospital, according to the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service.

He is also said to have failed to advise the same patient to stop their medication or record the person's symptoms.

For a fifth patient, he is accused of failing to explain the risks associated with increasing doses of an unnamed medication, and then failing to decrease the dosage.

Another allegation is that Dr Caswell failed to maintain records of all of the combined actions.

Dr Caswell, who used to work at the Beehive Surgery before going into practice for himself, has previously been banned for three months from practising, for 2003, for treating his own wife, Patricia.

He had been prescribing her morphine sulphate for pain relief, as she had a life-threatening bowel condition, between November 2000 and June 2002. The doctor then ignored an order to stop her prescriptions, between April and June the following year.

He later declared that he had removed all family members from his list at the Great Lever surgery.

Six years later though, he was hauled back before the authorities, then known as the General Medical Council, after he was found to have treated another relative, who was not his patient.

Dr Caswell had prescribed opiates to someone who was not supposed to be given those kind of drugs, unless new problems emerged, a GMC misconduct hearing was told.

The doctor administered 15mg of morphine to the patient and did not inform their GP of the treatment.

He was also accused of not referring the patient to the out-of-hours doctors’ service, or to Accident and Emergency.