Gosport doctor says she had ‘inadequate resources’ for the job
‘She’s always maintained that she was a hardworking, dedicated doctor in an inadequately resourced part of the health service’
THE doctor at the centre of the scandal that saw the lives of more than 600 people cut short by the use of powerful painkillers has said she always did “the best for her patients” while struggling to deal with “inadequate” resources.
Dr Jane Barton emerged from hiding yesterday to issue a brief statement in response to a damning independent report, which last week held her responsible for policies that led to the deaths of 656 patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital.
Speaking on her behalf, her husband Tim said: “Jane would like to thank her family, friends, colleagues, former patients and the many others for their continued support and loyalty.
“She has always maintained that she was a hard-working, dedicated doctor, doing the best for her patients in a very inadequately resourced part of the health service.”
Mr Barton went on to ask for privacy on his wife’s behalf at what he described as “this difficult time”, a move likely to anger relatives of those who died at the hospital while under her care between 1988 and 2000.
Dr Barton, now 70 and retired, remained silent during the short statement and returned inside her home in Gosport immediately after her husband finished speaking.
The couple were at one stage thought to have fled to Menorca following the publication of the report.
The Gosport Independent Panel found that there was “disregard for human life” at the hospital and that patients who were viewed as a “nuisance” were given drugs on syringe drivers that killed them within days.
Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, said the police and CPS would “carefully examine” whether new charges should be brought after families of the dead urged the authorities to prosecute those responsible.
The report drew parallels with the case of Harold Shipman, the Manchester GP who was found by an inquiry to have killed 250 people, and with Beverley Allitt, the Lincolnshire nurse who killed four children in the Nineties.
The figures place the hospital among the worst scandals in NHS history, alongside the Mid-staffordshire crisis, in which poor care at Stafford hospital was found to have led to excess patient deaths.
Concerns at Gosport were first raised as early as 1988 by nurses at the hospital, who warned managers that strong opioids such as diamorphine were being inappropriately prescribed.
Anita Tubbritt, a staff nurse at the hospital, along with several colleagues, raised concerns with hospital management but they were dismissed as “a small group of night staff who are ‘making waves’”.
The families of some of the patients whose lives were cut short have begun raising money for possible private prosecutions after losing faith in the police.
Hampshire Police announced last week it is to hand over its investigations to another constabulary, after a damning report found it failed properly to examine multiple reports by families and whistleblowers that doctors were giving patients dangerously high levels of opioid drugs.
The force was severely criticised by the panel after three investigations held between 1998 and 2010 failed to lead to any prosecutions.