A married Suffolk GP who lied repeatedly about his affair with a patient in a “calculated attempt to deceive his colleagues” has been struck off the medical register.

When Graeme Elvin’s tryst was uncovered, he was confronted and punched by his lover’s husband outside his surgery.

But he continued to deny the illicit relationship, causing so much psychological damage to the woman that she was left needing professional treatment while her husband, also a patient, was stigmatised as violent and forced to access medical care in a “protected environment” many miles from his home.

Recognising the “gross abuse of his position of trust”, a GMC panel concluded there was a “significant risk” he would repeat his behaviour, which was “fundamentally incompatible with being a doctor”.

The disgraced GP was suspended with immediate effect but will have 28 days within which to contest the sanction imposed.

The doctor was practising at Hardwicke House Surgery, in Sudbury, when he began his first extramarital affair with a woman referred to as Patient A in 2006.

After an initial consultation concerning neck pain, sessions between the two became flirtatious before developing into a sexual relationship with “extraordinary” rapidity, the panel found.

There followed a series of clandestine meetings, some of which took place at the patient’s home, and on numerous occasions Dr Elvin promised to leave his wife.

But he eventually ended the affair in April 2008, saying he wanted to spend more time with his daughter. Unknown to the jilted lover, he was already seeing a woman referred to as Mrs C.

Patient A was left “devastated” and her mental health deteriorated to the extent that she started suffering from depression. Her husband, named only as Patient B, was being treated by Dr Elvin for an arthritic hip.

Mrs C, her love rival, eventually told the husband about his wife’s affair, leading to the surgery car park confrontation in June 2009.

But instead of coming clean, Dr Elvin, who now lives in Holland, attempted to cover up the liaison, claiming Patient A had been “harassing him and his partner”.