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Southall is cleared of serious professional misconduct

BMJ - 1st October 2011 5:08 pm

The child protection paediatrician David Southall has been cleared of serious professional misconduct by the GMC over actions he took in two cases between 13 and 22 years ago.

A GMC fitness to practise panel found him not guilty of serious misconduct in keeping special case files separate from hospital medical records on two children without sufficient signposting, and sending a copy of a letter detailing child protection concerns about one of the children to the paediatrics department at the child’s local hospital, without addressing it to a specific paediatrician.

Several paediatricians called on behalf of Dr Southall gave evidence that both were minor errors.

A very dangerous doctor - are you sure?

By Bob Bury - 17th May 2011 11:46 am

Hello. Sorry it’s been so long between blogs, but I’ve been ill. Yes, much better now, thank you for asking. It doesn’t sound much I know - just a really bad chest infection/flu-type bug (excuse the technical terms there) but it managed to lay me low for the best part of a fortnight, and now I’m a stone lighter and still feeling knackered. My wife also suffered from it, but needless to say, bounced back much more quickly.

I tell you this for two reasons. Firstly because, at my lowest point, gasping for breath, unable to eat and too weak almost to move, I began to convince myself that I was going to develop chronic fatigue syndrome and spent the next few days of semi-delirium wondering how I was going to cope with suffering from a disease that I didn’t believe in. Luckily, I began to feel better, because I hadn’t thought of a convincing answer, but it’s a theme I might develop in my next (i.e. first) novel, in the increasingly unlikely event that it ever gets written.

More importantly, I mention my period of indisposition because it provided me with an excuse not to watch Channel 4’s ‘documentary’ A very dangerous doctor.

This programme was advertised as follows: “This Cutting Edge film explores one of the longest-running, most emotionally charged battles in British medical history.” It was, of course, about the hounding of Professor David Southall by the baying hordes who insist that Munchausen’s by proxy - or fabricated and induced illness (FII) as it is now known - is a figment of the tortured imagination of the evil doctors involved in child protection.

Now I don’t know about you, but to me, the word ‘explores’ suggests a degree of balance, a willingness to look at both sides of the argument. But we have to remember that this is Channel 4, and the director of the documentary was clearly not interested in balance (how else to explain the title of the programme?).

He wanted the story of innocent parents tormented by obsessed consultants, and there was no shortage of single-issue monomaniacs to provide it. The doyenne of the FII deniers is, of course, Penny Mellor, who has figured in these pages on several occasions (here and here), and she will have been well-satisfied with the boost given to her cause by the one-sided hatchet job on Southall.

Much was made by some reviewers of the fact that David Southall seemed a bit ‘odd’. If that were the case, it would hardly be surprising would it, given the way in which he has been serially harrassed by Mellor et al over the years? In fact the only really odd (and admirable) thing about him is the fact that after all of this, he is still out there, doing his best to protect children at risk.

The factual inadequacies of the programme were documented in the considered response of Professionals Against Child Abuse (PACA) - amazingly considered, actually, given the circumstances. It will soon become impossible to get anyone to involve themselves in child protection issues unless some sort of media response is mounted to this type of anti-professional journalistic attack on individual doctors.

I hope that, even now, PACA are trying to find a producer who will present the other side of this difficult issue, highlighting the real facts behind the individual cases presented on Channel 4. But I’m not holding my breath.

Tags: Southall
Posted in Bob Bury | 7 Comments »

Prof David Southall back in front of the GMC

By Mike Broad - 3rd May 2011 10:50 am

Professor David Southall is back in front of the GMC this week in a further challenge to his right to work as a paediatrician.

Southall, who came to prominence for his expertise on Fabricated or Induced Illness, was reinstated to the register by the High Court last May, after being struck off by in 2007. The GMC previously found that he had ‘wrongly’ accused a woman of involvement in the death of her son.

However, the GMC was left with outstanding issues over patient confidentiality and the keeping of secret files on patients. The High Court said the GMC should come to a conclusion on these issues.

In December 2007, a fitness to practise panel alleged that Southall, when informed by a child’s parents that they no longer wanted him to be involved in the child’s management, wrote to the referring doctor and copied the letter to another consultant paediatrician not involved in the child’s care without the consent of the child’s parents and that his actions were ‘inappropriate and breached confidentiality’.

It also claimed that he ‘damaged the integrity’ of a child’s medical records making them inaccessible to others involved in the child’s care. His actions were not in the best interests of the children, inappropriate and an abuse of his professional position, the panel alleged.

This week’s hearing - the third since last July - will decide whether the findings warrant a fresh attempt to remove the paediatrician from the register.

At the end of last year, Southall called for an inquiry into the GMC’s treatment of doctors who work in child protection. He cited cases where doctors have only been suspended for downloading child pornography prior to a return to work - whereas high profile child advocates, like him, have been struck off.

Southall’s case follows that of Prof Sir Roy Meadow, who was struck off in 2005 by the GMC for his role in Sally Clarke’s imprisonment, only to be reinstated by the High Court in 2006.

Tags: Child protection, Paediatrics, Southall
Posted in Hospital Dr News | 6 Comments »

Why punish child advocates more than abusers?

By Mike Broad - 24th November 2010 12:09 pm

You might have read my recent moan about the GMC. I know - easy target and all that.

I guess I was trying to make the basic point that after all these years, all the changes to the way it works, all the year-on-year rises in fees, there still appears to be puzzling inconsistencies in its consideration of a doctor’s fitness to practise.

As was pointed out to me after I’d posted the blog, I wasn’t being particularly fair. I was ignoring the culpability of trusts and the courts in the regulatory process, and I wasn’t comparing like-with-like in the cases I’d highlighted. I accept these points.

But then I read the BMJ, on 20 November, and felt vindicated in my suspicions that GMC decision making can be influenced by the media profile of a case.

Paediatrician Prof David Southall is soon to be up in front of a fitness to practise panel once more as part of long running investigations into his work.

In the post-Shipman era, when all the eyes were on the GMC to prove it was an advocate of patient safety, the investigations into the leading experts of fabricated or induced illness provided an opportunity for the regulator to dispel the perception that it looked after its own.

Both Southall and Roy Meadow were struck off the register for their work on child protection before being re-instated by the courts.

Behind all this there was a vociferous, and well-coordinated media campaign by parental activists, and its influences are still being felt today with the presence (all be it briefly) of chief protagonist Penny Mellor on the GMC’s children protection working group.

Whatever you think of Southall, and his actions concerning Sally and David Clark, he made an incredibly valid point this week at a conference; doctors who have accessed child pornography, and thus been complicit in abuse, have been treated more leniently by the GMC than those who have stridently attempted to protect children.

He cited a number of cases of doctors being simply suspended for downloading kiddie porn prior to a return to work.

Southall is calling for an inquiry into the GMC’s treatment of doctors who work in child protection. I’d go further, and suggest we need an inquiry into the consistency of the regulator’s decision making.

Tags: Child protection, GMC, Southall
Posted in Dr Blogs | 2 Comments »

Why give the scourge of paediatricians credibility?

By Bob Bury - 26th July 2010 1:36 pm

Only a week ago I was slagging off the GMC, saying that just when I thought they couldn’t do anything that would make me think even less of them than I already did, they had done just that (in their sentencing of Dr Jerome Ikwueke, one of the doctors in the Baby P case).

Foolishly, I thought that must be it. I didn’t feel it was possible for any organisation composed of supposedly sentient beings to sink lower in my estimation. But I underestimated them. They have trumped even that profoundly stupid decision by appointing Mrs Penny Mellor to their Expert Group on Child Protection.

In case you don’t know this lady, let me quote from an open letter to the president of the GMC from four paediatricians, who are chair and members of the organisation Professionals Against Child Abuse, which appeared in this week’s BMJ. They point out that Mellor:

• made false allegations against numerous paediatricians, other doctors, and nurses about their involvement in child protection cases, even to the extent of accusing doctors of sexual abuse of children, paedophilia and comparing one paediatrician to Josef Mengele.

• reported such professionals to their employers, regulatory bodies, and politicians, and harassed them through the media, in some cases wrecking their professional lives.

• contributed to a misguided and hostile media campaign against internationally acclaimed paediatricians who were central to the recognition and diagnosis of fabricated and induced illness (FII, previously known as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy), which contributed to the fitness to practise panels’ decisions to order the names of Professor Sir Roy Meadow and Professor David Southall OBE to be erased from the medical register in 2004 and 2007 respectively. After much damage to child protection work, these decisions were found to be erroneous: Sir Roy was reinstated to the medical register by the High Court and Southall by the Court of Appeal.

• created an environment in which doctors are now turning their back on child protection work for fear of being targeted in the above way.

• has been convicted herself of “conspiring to abduct a child,” with Judge Whitburn concluding: “…you have been a self-appointed advocate for those, amongst others, whose children are taken into care on the basis of what was known as Munchausens Syndrome By Proxy, now known as Fictitious Illness Syndrome. Your view was that this was a misdiagnosis, designed to cover up medical negligence. Impervious to debate, convinced you are right, you have traduced, complained about and harried dedicated professional people working in this difficult area.”

I hear on the grapevine that at least one paediatrician has resigned from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in protest at the continuing presence of members of that college on the Expert Group despite Mellor’s appointment. No-one objects to the inclusion of parent representatives on the group, indeed, it’s essential that they should be there. But there must be some sensible people out there who are not “impervious to debate” and who are capable of arguing rationally on this fraught topic.

Not only would Mellor appear to be supremely unqualified to sit on a group considering child protection issues, but the GMC is currently (wait for it - you won’t believe this) dealing with a fitness to practise case against Prof Southall (yes - again), the man whose career Mellor has made it her business to destroy.

And yet the idiots have appointed her to their advisory group dealing with the very issue in which she has been a major protagonist. I am not, as they say, a lawyer, but it occurs to me that, should the case go against Southall, he would have an excellent prima facie case for arguing that he cannot have had a fair hearing from an institution displaying such bizarre behaviour.

This appointment shows contempt for dedicated paediatricians who continue, despite the continual barrage of ill-informed abuse from la Mellor and her posse of single-issue zealots, to practise in this difficult and essential area. But then contempt for doctors is fast becoming the hallmark of the GMC. Given the inability of the medical profession to speak with a single voice on anything, it is presumably unlikely that we could ever arrange a mass refusal to pay the GMC annual fee. But a man can dream.

Tags: Child protection, Southall
Posted in Bob Bury | 2 Comments »

Paediatrician Southall back on the medical register

BBC Health - 4th May 2010 12:43 pm

Paediatrician Dr David Southall is back on the medical register after winning an appeal over a long-running dispute with the GMC.

The Appeal Court’s decision means he is able to practise medicine again.

The fitness to practise panel took action to strike Southall off the register in 2007 after he accused a mother of drugging and murdering her 10-year-old son.

The judges found that the GMC had failed to give adequate reasons over claims that Dr Southall had made.

The case has now been sent the case back to the GMC, which will be required to consider it again.

It found that his actions had added to the distress of the mother - Mrs M - following the death of her son, who hanged himself in 1996.

Lord Justice Leveson, giving the latest court ruling, said: “I am far from convinced that the public interest is truly served by a rehearing of the limited factual allegation that was made in this case, turning on the precise language used 12 years ago.

“If there is to be a re-hearing, I do not accept that it would be right for it to be conducted before the same panel; fresh minds should be brought to the issue in this case.”