Inquiry expected to hold GP responsible

A RETIRED GP is expected to be found responsible for the deaths of hundreds of patients.

Dr Jane Barton, 69 – dubbed Dr Opiate – is accused of prescribing fatal overdoses of opiate painkiller diamorphine to elderly patients in the 1990s.

An independent panel led by exbishop of Liverpool James Jones is looking into whether she shortened hundreds of people’s lives.

It has examined 833 death certificates she signed at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, Hants.

A report compiled after the £13million probe is due to be published on Wednesday. It will reportedly say Dr Barton was responsible for a number of deaths.

Dori Graham said her husband, Leonard, was killed after receiving care from Dr Barton and then a fatal injection by a nurse – the probe has included deaths involving other health workers acting on her orders. Dori, 86, said: “Len said he wasn’t in pain but they gave him the injection anyway. I sat there. Within a few minutes he was dead.”

The number of people who died suspiciously under her care could exceed the 92 cases examined by police previously. Families have suggested relatives were routinely given huge doses to “keep them quiet” on over-stretched wards.

Another patient, Arthur Cunningham, 79, died at the hospital in 1998 but his stepson Charles Farthing said: “He went in to be treated for bedsores. There’s no way he was near death.”

Concerns about Dr Barton, who lives in Gosport with her husband Tim, a former Royal Navy commodore, date back to 1991, when two nurses said they believed patients were being given diamorphine instead of the sedative diazepam. A 1998 police probe into unlawful killings ended due to insufficient evidence. Dr Barton was referred to the General Medical Council in 2001 for a fitness-to-practice hearing. In 2009, the GMC found her guilty of “serious professional misconduct”. Restrictions were placed on her but she was not struck off. Dr Barton retired soon afterwards.

Inquests into 11 deaths, in 2009 and 2013, ruled that medication she prescribed had contributed to six deaths. The latest inquiry was launched in 2014 and had been expected to take two years and cost £3.6million. It is not a criminal investigation.

The Rt Rev Jones will reveal its findings at Portsmouth Cathedral on Wednesday.

OF PATIENT ARTHUR CUNNINGHAM