£10m bonanza for hospital boss who failed to stop surgeon butchering women

THE boss of a private hospital firm where a rogue breast surgeon butchered hundreds of cancer patients pocketed around £10million after the scandal was exposed.

Rob Roger received the huge sum in bonuses, salary and perks before he stepped down as chief executive of Spire Healthcare last year.

By contrast, around 400 of Paterson’s patients at Spire – which was savaged in an independent report into the scandal in 2014 – are yet to receive any compensation.

Last night Paterson’s victims urged Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to order a public inquiry so hospital bosses, including those at Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust (Heft) where Paterson also worked, can be held to account.

Not one NHS employee or former employee has been disciplined over the failings, which allowed Paterson to mutilate hundreds of his patients. This is despite the fact that health chiefs in the NHS and private sector repeatedly missed chances to stop him, as revealed in Saturday’s Daily Mail.

Details of how health chiefs have been ‘rewarded for failure’ emerged after Paterson, 59, was convicted of wounding ten can- cer patients he conned into having surgery. He is facing a lengthy prison sentence following Friday’s jury verdicts.

Lawyers believe he may have carried out thousands of botched or unnecessary operations over the past 15 years.

Jurors were not told he is at the centre of a major scandal after carrying out 1,207 ‘experimental’ mastectomies in the NHS, or that 675 of his patients have since died.

Compensation claims from the scandal have cost the NHS nearly £18million.

Mark Goldman, the NHS ‘fat cat’ accused of trying to cover up the scandal, quit as chief executive of Heft with a £2.7million pension pot. Ian Cunliffe, who as Heft medical director tried to block a full recall of Paterson’s patients despite concerns, is still employed by the organisation. And Ruth Paulin, one of Mr Roger’s senior managers, landed a big job at Heft after leaving Spire in 2013.

Mr Roger was chief executive of Spire – which suspended Paterson in 2011 – from 2007 to 2016. The 55-year- old received around £10million in pay and bonuses after leading the company’s float on the stock exchange three years ago. In 2014, he was paid £6.2million, including a £4.45million bonus, and in 2015 received £1.09million.

In addition, he would have taken substantial dividends based on the shares in the firm given to him at the flotation. Calculations by the Mail show these payments to be worth around £ 3.45million between 2014 and 2016. This gives him a total of £10.7million from those three years alone.

The revelations come after it also emerged that two GPs tried to blow the whistle on Paterson three years before he was barred from carrying out operations at two of Spire’s hospitals. A review of the scandal by investigative consultancy Verita found that in 2008 the doctors feared he was performing unnecessary operations.

They demanded an independent audit of his operations by another breast surgeon. But it was never commissioned, and Paterson – who told bosses at Spire’s Parkway hospital that the GPs’ concerns were due to a ‘misunderstanding’ – was allowed to continue working until September 2011.

Paula Gelsthorpe, 59, who underwent two unnecessary lumpectomies at Spire Hospital, in Solihull, said it was ‘absolutely appalling’ managers were still refusing to take responsibility.

Mrs Gelsthorpe, from Worcester, said: ‘There should be a public inquiry and Jeremy Hunt should be looking into exactly what went one. Those hospital managers – at Spire and in the NHS – need to be held to account. People must have known [what he was doing].

‘For [Mr Roger] to have earned that amount, while hundreds of women have yet to receive anything – it’s appalling.’

Last night Spire declined to answer a series of questions, but said: ‘We have already paid compensation to a number of patients where there was a particular hardship case to be made. Later this year there will be a civil trial to resolve issues of liability and compensation ... There are three respondents in the case; Ian Paterson, Heart of England NHS Trust and Spire Healthcare.’

Mr Goldman and Mrs Paulin failed to respond to requests for comment. Mr Cunliffe and Mr Roger declined to answer questions. In 2014, Mr Roger said: ‘We give a full and unreserved apology to all of the patients and their families for any distress they have suffered ... I would also like to apologise to the professionals who raised concerns at the time.’

WHY DID THE NHS FAIL TO STOP THE BUTCHER SURGEON? Saturday’s Daily Mail

There is no shortage of drama written and produced about the holocaust. Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, The Pianist — these are only the most successful examples of how directors and actors have attempted the fraught task of using a medium of entertainment to communicate the horror of Nazi Germany’s policy to exterminate the Jews.

But now a theatre in the West end of London has embarked on what I believe is the first attempt to dramatise a much less well-known policy of mass murder carried out under Adolf hitler’s leadership — one which has lessons for this country today.

All Our Children, which opened last week at the Jermyn Street Theatre, is based on the programme known as Aktion T4, under which tens of thousands of Germans with learning disabilities were selectively eliminated. hitler dated this euthanasia Decree to the very day he sent his troops into Poland (September 1, 1939).

Perverted

In fact, hitler had long advocated the idea of eliminating those he considered a mere drain on resources. his belief that the ‘genetically weak’ should be weeded out was shared by a number of British politicians on the Left of the political spectrum: however, the so-called liberals who took this view at the time advocated compulsory sterilisation of the ‘feeble-minded classes’, not actual elimination.

But it was war which gave the Fuhrer the excuse to embark on such a policy: his argument about the need for scarce resources not to be wasted on ‘useless eaters’ would, during a state of war, seem less outlandish to members of the medical profession — who, after all, were the men being asked to carry out this task.

That dilemma for the German medical profession is at the heart of All Our Children.

Its author, Stephen Unwin, has a particular reason for writing such a drama (he is a successful theatre director, but this is his first play). his younger son, Joey, is a profoundly disabled 20-year-old, and, as he points out, ‘would no doubt have been murdered under T4’.

I have this much in common with him: my own younger daughter, Domenica, now almost 22, has Down’s syndrome. And people with this condition were also among the victims of the Nazis’ programme.

There was a link between the slaughter of the disabled and that of the Jews beyond the fact that both conformed to hitler’s pseudo-scientific theories of racial purity and perverted Darwinism.

The doctors presiding over the Aktion T4 programme used gas chambers. For example, at Sonnenstein, one of the six dedicated euthanasia centres, a room in the basement of a mental hospital was made into a gas chamber disguised as a shower room.

The chosen victims were, on arrival, told that they should strip off and enter the showers. But once inside, the gas valve was switched on and they were asphyxiated. (The process could take up to around 20 minutes: so much for the ‘ humane end’ which the Nazi doctors simpered about in self-justification.)

In this way, the industrialised method used for the mass extermination of the Jews — with deceptive play- acting designed to fool the victims into unknowing acquiescence — was pioneered with the likes of epileptics and those with Down’s as the guinea pigs.

Indeed, the Nazi doctors who came up with this innovative method of silent mass murder — such as Dr Irmfried eberl — later took a leading role in setting up and running the gas chambers of the extermination camps, notably Auschwitz. They were, after all, the experts.

The main character in Unwin’s remarkable play is an invented one: Dr Victor Franz, the director of a clinic for the young disabled, who each week — at the urging of his fanatical Nazi administrator — sends a selection of his patients to their fate.

At the centre of the play is a confrontation between Dr Franz and the Catholic Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who attempts to persuade the doctor to stop this perversion of medicine, with murder masquerading as care.

however, while Franz is an invention, von Galen was a real character — and his heroism is insufficiently known today. Although originally not opposed to the Nazis — Stormtroopers attended his enthronement, complete with Swastika flags — this aristocratic cleric was horrified when he learned what was happening to the disabled under their rule.

Appalling

But what marked him out as extraordinary was that he declaimed against both it and the whole theory of ‘racial purity’ from the pulpit.

In one such sermon, von Galen — an awesomely imposing man of almost 6ft 7in — denounced the euthanasia programme as ‘murder’, and thundered: ‘here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, invalids… unproductive, perhaps! But have they lost the right to live? have you or I the right to live only because we are “productive”? If all unproductive people may be thus violently eliminated, then woe betide our brave soldiers who return home wounded or maimed.’

The British government got to hear about this and printed thousands of leaflets of von Galen’s sermons, which were then dropped over Germany by the raf. Not surprisingly, some leading Nazis wanted von Galen executed. But hitler — who was in his way a very shrewd politician — never wanted outright conflict with the Catholic Church, not because he was a believer himself, but because he knew millions of Germans were, and devoutly so. Von Galen was not even arrested, still less executed.

More than that: in the wake of his sermons, the Aktion T4 programme was discontinued in August 1941, although a further 100,000 or so disabled were murdered in less methodical fashion during the remaining years of Nazi rule.

This illuminates something else: that those doctors who oversaw the programme of gassing — whether of the disabled or of Jews — were not under unbearable pressure to do so.

There is no record of those who refused being sent to concentration camps. Some acted as they did out of careerism — it certainly helped to be in the good books of the Nazis; others, because they actually enjoyed this foul work.

As was demonstrated by Dr Ian Paterson, the breast cancer surgeon last week found guilty of ‘malicious wounding’ of patients — unnecessary surgery carried out either for perverse pleasure or profit or both — there will always be some doctors, in any society, who abuse their profession in a depraved fashion.

Lessons

But when I said at the outset that Unwin’s play has lessons for us today, I was not thinking about the appalling Dr Paterson. I was thinking more about the fact that, in Britain, ever greater efforts are devoted to weeding out exactly the sort of humans that hitler and the Nazis regarded as ‘useless eaters’.

When, almost 22 years ago, I wrote about Domenica’s birth, the hugely popular Ex-nhs nurse and agony aunt Claire rayner declared that my wife and I had been ‘selfish’ in not agreeing to the tests to detect Down’s in utero — and that the costs of dealing with what she called ‘the misery’ of our daughter’s life would have to be ‘met by society’.

Leave aside the fact that Domenica is the least miserable person I know; rayner’s argument was exactly that put forward by the Nazi eugenicists. But far from being a latter-day Nazi, rayner was in the school of the apparently liberal health establishment, which regards selective termination on grounds of disability ( including even cleft palate) as just another form of medical ‘treatment’.

The NHS is about to launch what it regards as a much more efficient antenatal screening method, one which promises to identify Down’s babies with greater accuracy.

In fact, the ‘promise’ of a similar, new procedure was announced by German doctors a few years ago. But when they did so, their press conference was interrupted by a Berlin-based actor with Down’s, Sebastian Urbanski. he shouted out: ‘We’re humans too, dammit!’ his voice, and his cry, resonated in that country.

To truly understand why it did, you need to see All Our Children.