Unneeded drugs killed hundreds at U.K. hospital, inquiry finds

LONDON — As many as 650 patients at a small British hospital died from overdoses of powerful painkillers they did not need, an investigative panel reported Wednesday.

Officials failed or refused to exercise proper oversight for years, the panel determined, while family members and nurses who complained were dismissed as troublemakers.

From 1989 to 2000, doctors at Gosport War Memorial Hospital — and one doctor in particular — routinely prescribed heroin, also called diamorphine, and other opioids for patients who were not in any pain, and for others whose pain should have been handled with much milder drugs, in blatant violation of accepted medical practice, the panel found.

“There was an institutionalized practice of the shortening of lives through prescribing and administering opioids without medical justification,” John S. Jones, an Anglican former bishop of Liverpool who headed the government-commissioned investigation, told reporters.

Perhaps most disturbing was while many of the patients were elderly, most were not seriously ill.

The investigation described what happened in the wards of the hospital, near Portsmouth on England’s southern coast, as one of the worst patterns of medical misconduct ever documented. But it had little to say about why — leaving it unclear whether doctors were incompetent, callous or malevolent.

Beyond those wards, the panel found repeated failures by hospital administrators who wanted to protect doctors and the hospital’s reputation, pharmacists who did not raise alarms about highly excessive use of dangerous drugs, police officers who were not equipped to conduct a medical investigation and were not inclined to believe the scale of the problem, and government regulators — under both Conservative and Labour governments — who did not take the complaints seriously.

A large number of cases involved one doctor, Jane Barton, who the report said had established a pattern that was followed by others. A disciplinary panel investigating a small number of those cases censured Barton in 2009, and although she retired, she was not prohibited from practicing medicine.

Barton did not speak to the news media Wednesday. It was not clear whether the authorities would pursue criminal charges against her.