Gosport nurses first raised painkillers alarm 30 years ago
Patrick Sawer, Francesca Marshall and Olivia Rudgard NURSES raised the alarm over the unjustified use of powerful painkillers from the moment the doctor blamed for hundreds of lives being cut short arrived at Gosport hospital.
As early as 1988, staff warned Isobel Evans, the manager of Gosport War Memorial Hospital, that the drugs were being prescribed without medical justification, it has emerged.
But she failed to act on their concerns about the use of diamorphine, which an official report last week found had led to the deaths of 656 patients between the late Eighties and 2001.
The report by the Gosport Independent Panel concluded that Dr Jane Barton was responsible for the deaths through her excessive use of the drug, administered using syringe drivers.
The panel’s report last week praised The Sunday Telegraph for being among the first media outlets to report on unexplained deaths at the hospital. In July 2001 this newspaper reported that nine deaths were being investigated by police. The panel found that deaths at the hospital more than doubled between 1991 and 1998. But it has now emerged that nurses at Gosport hospital’s Redclyffe Annexe were strongly concerned about the way diamorphine was being used from when Dr Barton arrived in May 1988, three years before the sharp rise in deaths. When they tried to alert Mrs Evans and other managers, they faced a wall of “inaction”.
Their attempts to raise the alarm were described by Michael Taylor, the former chief executive of Oxfordshire Health Authority, in a 2003 report. He found that nurses working in the Redclyffe Annexe told their union, the Royal College of Nursing, of their concerns about the use of diamorphine in 1988.
The RCN made little progress in resolving the issue with hospital managers and in 1991 it asked Mrs Evans to launch an investigation into the matter.
In a memo to staff on Nov 7 1991, Mrs Evans urged nurses to identify “the names of any patients that they feel diamorphine (or any other drug) has been prescribed inappropriately”. But Mr Taylor said the tone of Mrs Evans’s in- structions was likely to have had the effect of silencing “relatively junior nurses” rather than encouraging them to come forward. He added: “The failure to follow-up the expression of concerns made by nursing staff about prescribing practice in Redclyffe Annexe from 1988 was a negligent act by the Unit Management Team.”
Mrs Evans, 78, who left Gosport War Memorial Hospital in 1996, refused to comment when approached.
The Government inquiry ignored evidence suggesting that cheap, faulty syringe drivers used by Barton may be responsible for thousands of deaths across the UK, fearing a national scandal, it was claimed last night. A whistleblower told The Sunday Times that concerns over the pumps had been “buried” by the panel, describing it as “one of the biggest cover ups” in NHS history. The drivers – used by the NHS for 30 years – have been linked to deaths right up until 2013. The panel was warned that if the full scandal emerged a national helpline and nofault compensation fund would need to be set up, the whistleblower claimed.
‘It is unrealistic to expect that senior managers… were unaware of the concerns’
Rose to the occasion