A family doctor faces being stuck off amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour towards his female patients.

Rodney Tate will appear before a General Medical Council fitness to practise panel in London.

The hearing for the former Brighton GP, who has not practised in the city since 2004, is expected to last two months.

The charge faced by Dr Tate, 70, is that he “conducted examinations of several female patients that were not medically justified, not in the patients' best interests and fell seriously short of the standards expected of a GP.”

It is also alleged that, “in some of those examinations, his actions were sexually motivated and that Dr Tate was dismissive of concerns about patient complaints raised by his GP partners concerning his method of undertaking intimate examinations on female patients.”

Dr Tate, who worked at the Old Steine Surgery in Brighton up until 2004, denies the allegations.

He was previously cleared of sexually assaulting 14 patients at a trial at Lewes Crown Court in March 2006.

The GMC suspended Dr Tate in 12004 when the allegations first came to light and reinstated him after the court case.

The reinstatement included a condition that he needed to retrain.

However following further GMC investigations the suspension was reinstated last year.

He has not worked as a GP in the city since his original suspension.

The disciplinary panel will meet to hear evidence and decide whether Dr Tate’s fitness to practise is impaired.

A spokesman for the Medical Defence Union confirmed it would be representing Dr Tate at the hearing but he would not comment on the case except to say he denied the charges against him.

The panel has five courses of action they can take against Dr Tate.

They are: to take no action, to accept undertakings offered by the doctor provided the panel is satisfied that such undertakings protect patients and the wider public interest, to place conditions on the doctor’s registration, to suspend the doctor’s registration or to erase the doctor’s name from the Medical Register, so that they can no longer practise.