A callous regime against the elderly
The enormity of what happened at Gosport War Memorial Hospital is almost impossible to comprehend. Hundreds of elderly patients who were admitted for treatment, mostly for non-life-threatening illnesses, were administered fatal doses of diamorphine and other inappropriate drugs. For some 10 years after nurses on the geriatric ward in 1991 had raised concerns about the medical practices being adopted by clinicians, nothing was done to stop it.
When the relatives of patients questioned why their loved ones had been given morphine when they were not suffering any pain they were ignored. Only when prescribing rules were tightened up after the conviction in 2001 of Harold Shipman, the GP who killed hundreds of his patients, did the practice end.
Even though newspapers began reporting the suspicions about Gosport at around the same time, it has taken another 18 years for the truth to come out after a panel chaired by James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool, was given access to all the hospital records. What they found was that 465 patients died where opioids had been given without appropriate clinical justification, and a further 200 early deaths may have taken place but records were incomplete. Throughout this time, the clinical and prescribing decisions were taken by Dr Jane Barton, who was investigated by the police and by the General Medical Council before being allowed to retire.
At every juncture in this tragic story, the patients and their relatives were let down – by the hospital, the police, the former MP Sir Peter Viggers, the Crown Prosecution Service and even the coroners. There have been half a dozen inquiries which failed to discover what the relatives knew and the panel confirmed. Only through the persistence of the media, especially the Portsmouth News, and the MP Caroline Dinenage, who succeeded Sir Peter in 2010, has this scandal finally been exposed, 27 years after the nurses first raised their concerns.
The parallels with Shipman are hard to ignore, though no one in the Gosport case has yet been charged with any offence. It points at the very least to a callous disregard by many in authority for the lives of elderly patients. The panel said this was “an institutionalised regime of prescribing and administering dangerous doses of hazardous medications”. We need to be sure this is not still happening elsewhere.