A doctor has been found guilty of historic indecent and sexual assaults on three colleagues at a hospital and on social nights out.
Dr Michael Ross groped the leg of one woman and placed his hand on her knee during separate incidents while employed as senior lecturer at the Queen’s Medical Research Institute at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.
Ross, 52, also placed his hand inside his trousers and fondled his erect penis in the presence of the same victim at the capital hospital.
The incidents took place between January 2009 and December 2011.
The sleazy medic then targeted a second female colleague when he slid his hand up the inside of her thigh as they sat in an Edinburgh pub while on a Christmas work night out in 2016.
The married father-of-two sexually assaulted the same woman on two further occasions when he intentionally touched her at a restaurant and stroked her leg in an office at the hospital.
He also indecently assaulted a third victim by seizing her by the waist at the hospital in 2009.
Ross, who also worked as a GP at a practice in Fife, denied all the allegations and has been standing trial at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on several dates over the past 12 months.
He returned to the dock at the capital court today where Sheriff John Cook delivered his verdict and found Ross guilty of three indecent assaults and three sexual assaults.
The sheriff also found Ross guilty of a further charge of intentionally causing a woman to be present while he engaged in sexual activity, all between January 2009 and March 2017.
Sheriff Cook said he had found all the victims to be “credible and reliable” and their evidence to the court had been “compelling” and “persuasive”.
The sheriff described Ross’s testimony as “implausible” and in his opinion “not believable”.
The disgraced doctor has now been placed on the sex offenders register and sentence has been deferred for reports to be prepared to next month.
One victim told the court she had been assaulted by Ross while she was attending a work Christmas party at the city’s Hanover Tap pub in December 2016.
She said she was sitting on a bench seat next to Ross when he slipped his hand under the table and groped the inside of her thigh.
The woman said she was left “mortified” by the assault and she had broken down in tears outside the pub when she confided in a work colleague as to what had happened.
She told the court Ross had gone on to assault her on two further occasions, once at an Edinburgh restaurant and again at the hospital where they both worked.
The woman said she later made a complaint to a professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Medical Education, where Ross was employed as a senior clinical lecturer.
Ross, from South Queensferry, West Lothian, denied all the allegations of assaulting the three women when he gave evidence to the court.
He admitted “inadvertently” placing his hand on the woman’s leg in the pub but had removed it immediately when he released what he had done.
In his deliberation, Sheriff Cook said the first woman had been “a compelling witness” as she described the doctor’s “escalating behaviour” towards her.
The sheriff said the second witness had given “a truthful and accurate account of the course of conduct that took place” between them.
Sheriff Cook acknowledged the woman had been forced to take steps to avoid being left alone with Ross while at work and she had been signed off due to the effects the assaults had on her.
Sheriff Cook added: “Your evidence, in my view, was not believable. I did not consider it to be credible or reliable.
“Your evidence on the Hanover Tap incident that you inadvertently rested your hand on the leg of the complainer and you moved it was entirely improbable.”
Ross was previously suspended from his position following a disciplinary hearing involving one of the complainers at Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in 2019.
He was subsequently allowed to return to work after the tribunal found striking him from the register “would be disproportionate, punitive and not in the public interest”.
