A TEENAGER posing as a doctor managed to fool workers at a Florida hospital for a month before he was caught out, even sitting in on an obstetrics exam.

The 17-year-old wannabe Doogie Howser was arrested by West Palm Beach police last week after staff inside the OB/GYN office were alerted by a patient that a “young black male who appeared to be a child was dressed as a doctor”.

The boy, whose name was withheld, had been walking around wearing a white doctor’s lab coat and carrying a stethoscope telling people he was a doctor, police said.

When confronted by officers called to St. Mary’s Medical Center, he told them he had been a doctor for “years” and that “his whole family knows he is a doctor”, according to the police report published by The Smoking Gun.

A security officer told police the boy was “known around the hospital as a doctor”, with multiple witnesses saying he had been seen walking around the hospital for approximately one month.

Doogie Howser, M.D. Neil Patrick Harris stars as Doogie Howser, M.D.

Surveillance video showed him “walking around hospital wings, but never entering any rooms or seeing any patients”, the police report said.

Nurses at the OB/GYN outpatient centre told police the boy had been inside an exam room while Dr Sebastian Kent conducted a patient examination. Dr Kent later discovered a note written by the boy on his desk, asking if he could “shadow” him.

When called to collect her son, the young man’s mother said he was under care for an undisclosed illness but refuses to take any medication.

Police confiscated his lab coat and all medical items but on agreement with hospital officials declined to pursue charges, The Smoking Gun reports.

Further investigation revealed the boy had also been spotted at a second hospital, the good Samaritan Medical Centre, where the hospital’s security director said she remembered a “younger black male dressed as a doctor walking out of the Emergency Room entrance” the previous week.

After searching the teenager’s van, police discovered a white lab coat with “Natural Medicine” embroidered on the chest, along with a “black doctor or nurse scrub-style top”.