The Huge Cover-up

THE HUGE COVER UP

Subject: SOUTHALL, THE GMC, NORTH STAFFS

Posted By Penny On 26 January 1999

CC. Frank Dobson CC. David Fillingham Chief Executive North Staffs Hospital CC . John Gregory Director of Central Services CC. Ms Crawford Lord Chancellors Dept CC. Audit Commission.

For the attention of Heather Ridge GMC.

Dear Ms Ridge

Having now sent you a copy of Professor Southalls police statement, I now find, having spoken to various people and done some more research that this is a scandal of huge proportions. A senior paediatrician allows children to be abused on camera without the approval of the ethics committee, one child that I know of definitely to date is seriously injured as a result of this. The senior paediatrician goes on to lie about these events to his own colleagues, the hospital injuncts the information, the GMC roll over and play dead pretending none of this is going on and Southall is still to this day allowed to carry on unchecked. I want him stopped now. The information is all over the internet, the confidentiality is now broken. You at the GMC and North Staffs Hospital have known for years what this man is capable of and you have done NOTHING. How many other children?

The statement being published on the internet was amongst documents and floppy disks taken from Child Advocacy International by Sharon Payne in August 1996 and copied. A second batch of documents were taken from North Staffs Hospital a few days later and similarly copied and returned. The documents were copied and widely circulated to mothers who had been campaigning for an investigation into Professor Southall. Some of the sets of copies went abroad. Southall and North Staffs Hospital took out confidentiality injunctions on everyone they believed had the documents or information from within them, even some people they merely suspected might have received them. Southall was terrified they would get into the public domain and be seen by his critics in the profession because they would show what kind of research he was doing without ethics committee approval or approval on behalf of the parents and children being studied under CVS.

A number of the parents who were campaigning sent full sets of copies to the GMC asking them to investigate Southall. The hospital and Southall used the courts and threats of imprisonment to force the mothers to disclose that they had sent documents to the GMC. Southall and the hospital then used the courts to order the GMC to return all the documents. This was around September/October 1996.

Sharon Payne was given a prison sentence for trying to protect the people she had sent documents to by refusing to disclose their names. To this day there are unanswered questions - why were confidential documents with undisguised patient information on them from North Staffs Hospital even on Child Advocacy premises? If they were so confidential the trust had to go these lengths to recover them and seek imprisonment for those who had handled them why didn't they go after Southall and Child Advocacy International and its chair Judge Bellamy? The documents clearly showed that Southall had been running a research project under the guise of CVS and child protection without the ethics committee consent of the Brompton Hospital, Crawley Hospital, North Staffs, Exeter, Southampton and others.
The children referred to him for investigations under CVS were being subjected to research without their parents' knowledge, or the knowledge of the health authorities sending them there. The cover was eventually blown when Southall published the outcome of his CVS project in Pediatrics in 1997.

Southall DP, Plunkett MCB, Banks MW, Falkov AF, Samuels MP Covert Video Recordings of Life-threatening Child Abuse: Lessons for Child Protection Pediatrics. 1997;100:735-760

Note the presence of Martin Banks in the list of authors - Banks did not disclose his link with Staffordshire social services or Child Advocacy International in the Pediatrics paper. Southall lied in the paper by saying the Brompton had approved his research project - they didn't - someone should ask them why they haven't referred him to the GMC. Lying to professional colleagues is a 'capital offence' for doctors - the GMC could and should strike him off for this. The Pediatrics paper on CVS was based on the material which was leaked, and this was why he was terrified it would be disclosed. This is the real truth behind the cover up, and the GMC is implicated in this because it had the evidence and did nothing.

Penny Mellor

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