Doctors giving patients killer drug overdoses ‘across the UK’
THE practices which led to the deaths of hundreds of patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital are widespread in the health service, experts warned last night.
Patients’ lives are being deliberately shortened by doctors and nurses, they claimed.
One leading health academic said NHS staff were routinely hastening death through a ‘lethal combination’ of sedatives and dehydration. Professor Patrick Pullicino said it was commonplace for doctors to ‘ diagnose’ the impending death of their patients – and then put them out of their ‘perceived misery’.
A second expert, Professor Brian Jarman, said it was ‘likely’ that a Gosport-style scandal was already happening elsewhere.
Up to 650 patients are feared to have died at the Hampshire hospital between 1988 and 2000 after being given dangerous doses of opioid painkillers. An inquiry on Wednesday revealed how they had been under the care of one GP, Dr Jane Barton, who visited the hospital for two hours each day. She issued nurses with instructions to ‘please make comfortable’ which was medical shorthand for prescribing opioids.
Bereaved families are calling for Dr Barton and others at the hospital to face criminal charges. As the fall- out from the scandal continued:
The chief constable of Hampshire Police, which has conducted a string of inquiries into the affair, admitted some of the force’s investigations were ‘not of a high quality’ and that it was time to hand the probe over to another force;
There was still no sign of Dr Barton at her £700,000 Georgian townhouse amid claims she has left Britain for Spain;
Jeremy Hunt said that the ‘blame’ culture in the NHS had to change to help uncover scandals such as the deaths at Gosport.
Two leading health experts suggested that the practice of overprescribing powerful painkillers to shorten life was not limited to the Gosport hospital. Professor Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist at East Kent Hospitals University Trust, claimed it was widespread.
‘There is really a group-think within the NHS that you can diagnose who is dying without any scientific capability of doing so,’ he said. ‘Once you have an idea that someone is dying, it’s reasonable to dehydrate, to stop fluids and to sedate them.
‘There are carers – particularly the end of life teams – who feel it is reasonable to dehydrate people in that situation. These practices are still ongoing and they have become acceptable and widespread. There is a muddled thinking that if someone is dying, their body is shutting down and therefore they don’t need fluids. That is nonsense reasoning.
‘Number one, you can’t tell if someone is dying. Number two, if you start to dehydrate someone they die. The main thing is dehydration but the combination of dehydration and sedation is particularly lethal.
‘There is no scientific evidence that patients benefit from sedatives. Sedation is very controversial and there’s no real scientific basis for it for end of life care.
Professor Pullicino was one of the first doctors to raise concerns about the Liverpool Care Pathway, in 2012, whereby staff hasten patients’ deaths by withdrawing food and fluids.
Although the NHS published guidelines in 2015 to end the practice, Professor Pullicino said patients were still being deliberately denied water.
He urged the NHS watchdog, the Care Quality Commission, to monitor the practise of dehydration at other hospitals.
Meanwhile, Professor Sir Brian Jarman, head of the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College London which specialises in hospital mortality data, said the issues in Gosport could exist elsewhere.
He told the BBC: ‘I don’t think it’s on the same scale. But I think there probably are deaths in hospital which could have been avoided.’ He said information on mortality rates produced by the Dr Foster unit was not properly assessed by health officials.
‘There really is a desire not to know,’ he warned, adding that whistleblowers in the NHS were still ‘fired, gagged and blacklisted’.
A Department of Health and Care spokesman said: ‘ There is currently no evidence of similar practices being used in other hospitals. The events at Gosport were an absolute tragedy but patients can be reassured that important changes have taken place since then to ensure employees can speak up about mistakes – including strengthened protection for whistleblowers, national and local freedom to speak up guardians and an avenue for staff to raise concerns with the Care Quality Commission or their regulator where they feel unable to with their employer.’ Police are now closely examining the inquiry into Gosport to see whether there is enough evidence to bring about criminal charges.
Dr Barton was investigated by the General Medical Council in 2010 but not struck off.