Dr Jane Barton was implicated in the deaths of 656 hospital patients. Despite three investigations, she has never been held to account. Now, the victims’ families are asking:
Why has this woman not faced justice?
A HOSPITAL GP presided over an “institutionalised regime” that cut short the lives of more than 600 patients after they were prescribed powerful painkillers without medical justification, a report has found.
Dr Jane Barton was yesterday held responsible for policies that led to the deaths of 656 patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital between the late Eighties and 2001. Dr Barton worked at the hospital for 12 years from 1988.
The report said there was “disregard for human life” and that patients who were viewed as a “nuisance” were given drugs via syringe drivers – which deliver consistently high doses – that killed them within days.
Last night families of the dead urged the authorities to prosecute as Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, said the police and Crown Prosecution Service would “carefully examine” whether charges should be brought.
Charles Farthing, stepson of Arthur Cunningham, 79, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and dementia, said: “I’d like to see some action. Barton was utterly reckless in her prescribing, utterly reckless. She gave the nurses free licence to deal with these patients as they wished. If a nurse didn’t like you, you were a goner.”
Gillian Wilson lost her husband, Robert Wilson, 74, who was meant to be undergoing rehabilitation after suffering a broken arm in 1998. She said he was “immediately placed on a course of morphine and began to deteriorate”. She added: “He was sedated, despite being no trouble to anyone.”
Gillian Mackenzie, 84, was the first to complain to police in 1998 and has campaigned tirelessly for justice for her mother, Gladys Richards. She said: “It is not finished. I am not settling for corporate manslaughter. I have always said that this is a case for gross negligence manslaughter.”
The report also criticises Hampshire Constabulary, the General Medical Council, and Sir Peter Viggers, the Gosport MP at the time of the deaths, for their failings. The case 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 1991.
The Gosport report found that the records show that 456 patients died when medication was given without justification. It said that, taking into account missing records, there may have been another 200 deaths.
It ranks among the worst scandals in NHS history, alongside the Mid Staffordshire crisis, in which poor care led to excess patient deaths.
Concerns were first raised at Gosport in 1991 by whistle-blowers who said strong opioids such as diamorphine were being prescribed inappropriately. Anita Tubbritt, a staff nurse, along with several colleagues, raised concerns with hospital management, but were dismissed as “a small group of night staff who are ‘making waves’”.
Despite three police investigations, Dr Barton was allowed to continue practising until she retired in 2011, shortly after a GMC hearing found her guilty of serious misconduct, but failed to remove her from the medical register.
The Sunday Telegraph was among media outlets praised by the report, with the newspaper among the first to follow up reports in the Portsmouth
News that police had investigated a death at the hospital in 2001.
The report disclosed how deaths at the hospital more than doubled between 1991 and 1998, with fatalities ascribed to bronchopneumonia rising more than nine-fold between 1992 and 1994, which the panel suggested was a cause frequently listed for patients given the painkillers inappropriately.
Prescriptions for drugs such as fentanyl and diamorphine are only supposed to be given as a last resort for patients who are not responding to other painkillers, and if their family gives their permission. But in many cases families were not given enough information about the patient’s condition and the drugs were used on those who were not in severe pain. Of the patients admitted to the wards between 1987 and 2001 for whom there were records, 40 per cent were given the drugs inappropriately, the panel found.
The report criticised hospital administration and Hampshire Constabulary for failing to act when alerted to the issues by whistle-blowers.
The GMC acted with a “lack of candour” after family members discovered that Dr Barton’s brother, Prof Christopher Bulstrode, had been on the GMC council until October 2008.
The report also details how Sir Peter questioned the need for inquiries into the hospital, and how two managers who dealt with the initial reports were suspended a decade later having been allowed to rise to chief executive level.
In one case, a nursing auxiliary told the police that she and another member of staff had discussed a “difficult” elderly man, concluding that if he wasn’t careful he would “talk himself on to a syringe driver”.
Giving evidence to the fitness to practise panel in 2009, Dr Barton admitted that patients not in pain were given potent opioids. Asked about the case of Elsie Devine, an 88-year-old woman admitted for rehabilitation who was given a fentanyl patch followed by a syringe driver containing diamorphine, Dr Barton said she was “not [in] physical pain but not happy, not comfortable, not easy to look after”.
The Health Secretary told the House of Commons the police and CPS would “carefully examine the new material in the report before determining their next steps and in particular whether criminal charges should be brought”.
A CPS spokesman said: “We will consider the content of the report and will take any appropriate steps as required.”
Theresa May told MPS at Prime Minister’s Questions that politicians needed to address the issue of public sector bodies “closing ranks”, adding: “I’m sorry that it took so long for the families to get the answers from the NHS.”