A retired consultant psychiatrist has been cleared by the Court of Appeal of raping a woman patient in a hospital photo-copying room.

But Dr Michael Haslam, 70, lost his appeal against his convictions for indecently assaulting the woman on a separate occasion and three indecent assaults on two other women patients.

The court's decision to quash the rape conviction as unsafe means Dr Haslam is now serving a three-year prison sentence instead of seven years.

The doctor, of Crayke, near Easingwold, North Yorkshire, was convicted at Leeds Crown Court last year.

The offences were said to have occurred between 1981 and 1988 while he was working for the NHS in North Yorkshire.

Haslam worked at Clifton Hospital, York, and held clinics at York District Hospital and elsewhere until he left the NHS in 1989 and entered private practice. He retired in 1998.

Quashing the rape conviction, three appeal judges in London ruled "regrettably" that the trial judge, Mr Justice Gray, was wrong in allowing "similar fact" evidence to be given by a fourth woman.

She had told how she, like the alleged rape victim, was taken by Dr Haslam to the photocopying room in a remote part of The Clifton Hospital for the purpose of taking a print of her hand as part of a stress diagnosis process. Sexual contact occurred although it was with her consent.

Lord Justice Maurice Kay, sitting with Mr Justice Elias and Judge Barker QC, said the evidence was of "dubious or no relevance" because what happened was consensual, there was no suggestion of intercourse and Dr Haslam had never disputed that he sometimes took patients to the room to make hand prints.

''We consider that the judge underestimated the prejudice which flowed from her evidence," he said. It portrayed the defendant as a doctor who would not hesitate to take sexual advantage of a vulnerable patient in his care.''

There was a real risk that the jury placed significant reliance on it when considering the evidence of the rape complainant, whose account of actual intercourse was very brief and who had not complained specifically of rape immediately after the event, they said.

The judges rejected other grounds of appeal, in which it was argued that the case should have been halted at the outset because the lapse of time since the events occurred made a fair trial impossible, and that the charges relating to the rape complainant should have been heard separately from the other counts.

The judges were told that Dr Haslam, who has been placed on the sex offenders' register, had a distinguished career and had published a number of works on subjects including his specialisms in psycho-sexual disorders and marital problems.

At the end of the judgment, the Crown sought a retrial on the rape charge but the judges said they did not think a retrial would be in the public interest.