DID COVER UP SHIELD HER FROM JUSTICE?
There are many who would envy the life of retired GP Jane Barton. She has a good NhS pension, a solid marriage, and lives in a Georgian house with large garden in a smart suburb on england’s south coast.
She is a stalwart of the community in Gosport, Portsmouth, enjoying bird watching and drives to the beach or countryside with her loyal husband Tim, a former royal Navy commodore.
Yet there is a shadow over Dr Barton that refuses to budge. She has been accused of prescribing fatal overdoses to her elderly patients while working at nearby Gosport Memorial hospital in the 1990s. The accusations have led to four inconclusive police and Crown Prosecution probes, 11 inquests, various health Service inquiries, a hearing by the doctors’ watchdog the General Medical Council (GMC) and a special ‘death audit’ to find why so many of the hospital’s patients died unexpectedly.
Last year, when I investigated the high number of deaths of patients in her care, Dr Barton, now nearing 70, refused to speak to me about her time at the hospital between 1988 and 2000.
There is no suggestion that she deliberately took lives and she is among several medical staff, including a senior nurse, who have been questioned over the years about it.
As her husband Tim told the media 16 years ago: ‘Instead of trying to find a new harold Shipman, it might be more constructive to ask why a part-time GP was looking after 48 beds.
‘No-one has ever seen the letters she sent [to the hospital authorities] saying, “You can’t keep sending me this number of patients. I cannot cope with this number.”’ Certainly Gosport Memorial was a very busy community hospital specialising in respite care. And Dr Barton, who signed off some of the death certificates with a distinctive signature in black ink, was known not to ‘suffer fools gladly’.
At the GMC hearing into her conduct, which ended in 2010, she said that caring for increasing numbers of elderly had put her, and other medics at Gosport Memorial, under ‘unreasonable’ pressure. She did not want her patients to suffer in pain, she insisted and had always acted in their interests.
Dr Barton has many supporters. She was flanked by lawyers, and often her husband Tim, at the GMC hearing. They called her a ‘good doctor’ of great integrity, producing 200 testimonials from other medics and her GP patients. She was found guilty of professional misconduct, however, and criticised for prescribing strong drugs in ‘an excessive, inappropriate, potentially hazardous’ way. Barred from giving opiate injections, but not struck off the medical register, she was allowed to continue her work as a local GP, retiring after the GMC hearing.
Victims’ families were aghast. And dozens of them claim the truth about their loved ones’ deaths has been subject to a cover-up and that Barton has been protected by the establishment.
She was respected in local society and has influential friends, they say. The Gosport road runners club awarded a Jane Barton plate for the ‘ most improved female runner’, and she was an enthusiastic member of the royal Navy birdwatching society.
She moved in the same circles as the area’s local MP Sir Peter Viggers, who had been forced to stand down in 2009 after claiming £30,000 in public money for maintaining the garden at his country house, including £1600 for an ornamental duck house.
Yesterday the Sunday Times reported that Sir Peter has since been accused by Normal Lamb, a Liberal Democrat former health minister, of being ‘ constantly dismissive of relatives’ complaints’ about the loved ones they lost and ‘behaving as if it was outrageous to challenge a doctor in that way.’
The relatives of victims say their often desperate pleas to their MP about those who had unexpectedly died were never answered satisfactorily.
AND there was another curious matter. It was back in 2001 that Jane Barton was originally referred to the GMC for a fitness to practice probe over the high death numbers.
The hearing did not take place until 2009, and her brother Christopher Bulstrode, an emeritus professor of orthopaedics at Oxford, was on the GMC council during the intervening years when she was being investigated prior to the eventual hearing – though he took no part in the investigation.
The GMC said last week: ‘Dr Barton’s hearing began in June 2009 when Professor Bulstrode was no longer on the council. he had left in December 2008 before any decisions about the case were taken.’ After the GMC hearing came the 2013 audit into the death rate at the hospital by respected Professor richard Baker. he had been an adviser to an inquiry into convicted serial killer harold Shipman, the GP believed to have murdered nearly 250 of his patients with the opiate diamorphine, a pain killer used in end of life care.
The professor concluded that at Gosport Memorial there was an ‘ almost routine’ use of opiates and a ‘remarkably high’ proportion of dead patients had received them. he said that Dr Barton may not have originated this practice but she, and other medical staff, continued it after she started working at the hospital as a part time clinical assistant in 1988.
Worryingly, his death audit said the frequent use of such drugs and sedatives may ‘almost certainly’ have shortened the lives’ of some patients who might otherwise have been discharged. The phrase, ‘Please make comfortable’ found in many medical notes, became a euphemism for starting the patient on strong painkillers.
In my investigation last year, I found disturbing signs that things were amiss at the hospital. Some relatives who visited their dead loved one’s bodies in the morgue told me it was full.
Meanwhile, a patients’ services officer revealed on an NhS internet site how, during one busy afternoon, he consoled the next of kin of no fewer than eight patients who had passed away overnight from pneumonia, according to their death certificates.
he added: ‘Some of the elderly were scared to go to sleep because they were afraid they would not wake up. They were distressed and frightened about being given painkillers.’
Now we await a final verdict on this unsettling affair from the ex-bishop of Liverpool James Jones’s panel. For some, it cannot come soon enough.
As one relative of 79-year-old Arthur Cunningham who died in 1998 after going in to the hospital to be treated for bedsores has said: ‘Not knowing the truth for all these years has blighted our own lives. ‘We feel they were all in it together and the whole system has blocked any proper truths for 20 years.’
Stephen Lloyd, Liberal Democrat MP for eastbourne is unequivocal: ‘What went on at Gosport was wicked,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping that after this report Barton is in the cross-hairs along with hampshire police, the NhS and the GMC. there has been the most enormous cover-up.’
As for Dr Barton, she will soon find whether she is shaken out of her comfortable retirement of birdwatching and enjoying her £700,000 Gosport house with its smart conservatory and numerous cars on its gravel drive.