Mick Hartley

Minette Martin on disgraced paediatrician David Southall:

Southall is a man whose arrogance seems breathtaking. In 2000 he felt able, after watching a Channel 4 programme about Sally Clark, then wrongly in prison for murdering her two baby sons, to ring the police and tell them he suspected the father was the murderer and might harm the remaining child in his care. Southall came to this conclusion without seeing any medical or postmortem records. His accusation was based on his expertise, whatever that can mean in such a context.

To accuse a bereaved father, whose wife is in prison for murdering their babies, of committing the crimes himself, with a view to having his remaining child taken away; to do so without the most carefully examined evidence; to intrude in the case without a professional invitation and worst of all to do so when he was prohibited from intervening in such cases because he had been suspended; and to fail to apologise to the Clarks, strikes me as déformation professionelle at its most monstrous.

The General Medical Council found Southall guilty at the time of serious misconduct and banned him from child protection work for three years. Three years later, last Tuesday, the GMC struck him off the medical register for other reasons. Complaints had been made to the GMC about Southall, including the removal of nearly 4,500 hospital case notes to his own files. The panel spoke of his “multiple failings over an extended period” and his “deep-seated attitudinal problems”, but what finally got him struck off, among other things, was his treatment of a woman whose 10-year-old son had hanged himself.

Southall accused this mother, to her great distress, of drugging and hanging the boy herself; this was in front of a senior social worker who was considering removing her other child. He also brought up with this unhappy woman another possibility, only to dismiss it, that her 10-year-old had died in an autoerotic sexual experiment. The scene as Southall himself described on Radio 4 sounded almost insanely insensitive and improper and would have been so even had the mother been guilty, which she wasn’t.

What is disturbing is that many paediatricians and other doctors support Southall…

Indeed they do, and here, right on cue, is Dr Nigel Speight at CiF, bemoaning the “victimisation” of his fellow paediatrician. I won’t bother to quote from it, as it’s largely what you might expect. The comments, though, are worth a read if you’re interested in this debate. Southall’s defenders don’t come out of it too well.