Salon Health & Body | Physicians, heal thyselves


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By Robert Burton, M.D. [03/20/00] Urge The voices in my head They've been narrating my sexual fantasies and calling me names since I was 9, and that's ... OK. By Cary Tennis [03/18/00] Complete archives for Health & Body - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		Physicians, heal thyselves The biblical injunction takes on new meaning as British doctors struggle to regain public confidence. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Elkan Allan March 23, 2000 \| The conviction of Dr. Harold Shipman last month for the murder of 15 of his patients has sparked a major crisis of confidence in British medicine. Now we hear that the bearded, outwardly respectable doctor may have killed as many as a thousand more. And since his conviction, British newspapers have carried at least one story of medical malpractice every day. The lead story Saturday in the London Times was "Rogue Doctors To Be Struck Off For Life," revealing that the country's health secretary, Alan Milburn, is "incandescent with fury" that Shipman, 54, was permitted to go on seeing patients long after he had been accused. He wants the British Medical Council to change its rules to ban doctors from ever practicing again after being found guilty of a medical offense. At the moment, a doctor can apply to be reinstated after 10 months, and 1 in 5 is successful. Friday's Guardian reported "New Organ Scandal Forces Hospital Chief To Quit" after staff at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool disposed of the heart, brain and lungs of 10-day-old Stephen White by mistake, on the day they were to have been handed to his parents for burial. This follows the revelation that the hospital had removed the organs of 893 dead children without informing their parents. The day before, the Daily Mail had a story titled "Baby Died After Junior Hospital Doctor Sent Him Home." This was the case of newborn Callum Wright, diagnosed with Group B streptococcus but released from Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, only to worsen a week later. When his parents took him back, a junior doctor, on her first day there, told them they were being "overprotective." He died at home 24 hours later. And Sunday's Observer capped a disastrous week for the National Health Service when it led with "Private Care Bonanza as Sick Spurn NHS." It revealed that the number of people paying for private operations in order to avoid the long waiting lists has risen by 40 percent since 1997. What is going on in the country once so proud of its National Health Service for providing free and efficient cradle-to-grave medicine for all? Is there a real breakdown in the system or is it a hysterical press reaction? Has the Shipman case revealed too great a reliance on the family doctor as an unquestioned fount of wisdom? An avalanche of scandals is forcing Britain to debate these questions. These include: The arrest in February of Dr. John Gordon for the manslaughter of five patients following the exhumation of a body in Carlisle. Keir Hamilton, 18, died from suspected methadone poisoning. Police launched an investigation into the quantity of methadone Gordon was prescribing to addicts to wean them off heroin. The case of Graham Reeves, a 70-year-old Welshman who went into Prince Philip Hospital, Llanelli, to have a diseased kidney removed. Four doctors, now suspended, took out his healthy kidney instead. On March 1 he died. Continuing the bungling, Robert Fletcher Deane, leader of the Royal College of Surgeons' official inquiry into the blunder, turned out to be in the midst of being sued for wrongfully extracting the healthy kidney of a woman in Glasgow three years ago. "If we'd known, we would have asked someone else," said an RCS spokesperson. The striking off the medical register of surgeon James Whiseheart of Bristol in February for continuing with open-heart operations despite warnings from other doctors after 29 children died in 53 of his operations and four others suffered brain damage. He told an inquiry, "The problems we experienced are a microcosm of what is happening all across the National Health Service -- experienced surgeons battling against difficult circumstances, with inadequate resources and in a culture where the finding of scapegoats appears to be put before the finding of solutions." The inability of the hospital service to cope with this winter's flu epidemic. Dying patients were left on gurneys and a third of patients waiting for urgent operations were sent away because there were no beds available. At East Surrey Hospital, near Gatwick Airport, a 71-year-old woman with angina was left on a trolley for 49 hours although government guidelines say no one should be left on a gurney for more than four hours. The hospital also left a 73-year-old woman with a broken leg on a trolley for 45 hours, and a 56-year-old man with pulmonary edema for 32 hours. Chief executive Isobel Gowan blamed an acute shortage of staff, which has forced her to close 30 hospital beds. "Low pay has left the hospital with a shortage of 350 nurses," she said. Next page \| Shipman's preferred victims were old and female


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