Dr Esperanza Cabal acts contrary to Catholic Church wishes

Dr Esperanza Cabal sworn in By President Arroyo (on the left) as Acting Health Secretary in January 2010 already has Catholic Church Bishops asking for her dismissal. On Valentine Day she ordered distribution of condoms which Catholic Church opposes and claims that it would not help the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Philippines have 40% of population earning about $2.00 a day and population control as well as health improvement are obvious needs. Last year Philippines recorded over 800 new cases of AIDS.
In UK Labour administration did not have such a problem with condoms but they certainly do when it comes to the wearing of religious uniforms in inappropriate settings. I am not talking about fetish here, but the needs of mentally ill to be given free space to trust their doctors and nurses as well as their social workers who do not wear uniforms unless they happen to be Catholic Mother Superior.
When Mother Superior gets a job in UK as a social worker all the ethics flies out of the windows and Health Ministers away from their jobs.
Pathetic state of affairs. Maybe UK should have a woman with courage to put the right policies through rather than kneeling Health Secretaries who put their personal interests first and patients second.

Support Elsie's Law

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION ELSIE's LAW

On November 21st 1999 Elsie Devine died at the Gosport War Memorial Hospital her life was shorten without justification or logic. Elsie was not a lone in meeting her fate at the hands of Dr Jane Barton there were many other elderly.

Elsie did not have a incline when she kissed her son good night that she was already on the terminal pathway and that the very next day she would be drugged unconscious and nor did her family. Elsie did not deserve her life to be terminated, let alone without her or her family’s knowledge. Elsie is one in many and this practicing must be stopped.

After 4 Police investigations, an Inquest and a GMC hearing it is clear that Elsie’s life was terminated at the will of one person; the Doctor who saw her as a bed blocker and worthless.We the undersigned petitioned the Prime Minister to create a law that states caring professionals alone do not have the legal right to start a patient on drugs that are included in the Liverpool Care Pathway, without the consent of either the patient or the next of kin.

Drugs used in the Liverpool Care Pathway have been under much speculation. Although an audit of Care of the Dying, by the Marie Curie and the Royal College of Physicians in 2009 found that nearly 4000 terminal patients found the framework to be of high quality, there is no doubt that some patients remain at risk.(Full Audit)) There is room in current practice for elderly, vulnerable patients to be started on the LCP without their or their family’s consent; it is not good enough to assume that in all hospitals, hospices and care homes that conversations will take place and that patients and families will be kept informed. The audit reveals that two thirds of the 3,893 patients whose deaths were assessed needed no continuous infusion of medication, and all by 4% only needed low doses of opiates.

However, there have been cases where patients have been started on high doses of opiates and sedatives via infusion and died prematurely.

We should not have to fight for justice after death; the law should be there to protect us when we are alive.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Elsies-Law/

When the ‘system’ fails who will protect us when we are too vulnerable to protect ourselves. Read the full story here.

Mr Gordon Brown, PM, Anger Management

Today I read about our PM allegedly having temper outbursts, sometimes with swearing, thumping of upholstery and throwing of small items at the staff/advisers at 10 Downing Street.

London dinner parties must be lively tonight with numerous jokes about what one can do with a mobile phone, newspapers, pencils and tins of Coke when faced with infuriating subordinates. As I am busy blogging I have to entertain myself by making up some things:

Q What you do with an empty can of Coke?

PM: Throw it until you get a call from National Bullying Helpline. After that recycle.

Q: What do you do with a pencil?

PM: I use it to sharpen the minds of my advisers. After that I use pencil sharpener. (See PM's artistic potential in the right upper corner. Is there an Occupational Therapist who could resist giving him urgent assessment?)

Q: What do you do with newspapers?

PM: Read, then throw at my advisers. After that recycle both.

Q: What do you do with your mobile?

PM: Make it more mobile. I let it fly at my advisers. After that recycle both. Ask Sarah if Naomi Campbell has a spare one.

I am a compassionate Consultant Psychiatrist having suffered false allegations of madness for more than ten years thanks to the incompetence of my colleagues and the General Medical Council (GMC) in London.

Our dear PM would be delighted to know that GMC investigator, one Bill Sukhbir accepted a complaint from a Labour Party member and GMC FTP panelist, Dr Peter Jefferys , that I discharged a mentally ill person to a hotel. Must have been NHS Hotel Grand, as the patient was on Section 3 (compulsory admission to hospital) at Northwick Park Hospital, NHS. Wonderful achievement both for Labour Party and myself. Our NHS hospitals are now better than ever.

One thing that may help Prime Minister is the knowledge that GMC can produce a list of Hired Guns, psychiatrists one can depend on to write anything for a payment. Presumably, these are exactly the sort of people PM should avoid. I have the list and it is free of charge.

I am not worried about PM's mental health. Firstly, he is not female. Although, allegedly temper problems started in 2007, the same year GMC had assessed twice as many female doctors by psychiatrists compared to male doctors. Gordon is definitely a man. No, Ms Harriette Herman, Equality Minister, he is not equal to others. The man has got an advantage, and I can prove it. And you do not need my address, you know who I am.

Anger management is very easy. The only thing that is required is to change one's expectations. One has to stop projecting one's intelligence onto others.

Having lived in communism I do know about passive aggressive behaviour from those who have no incentives to do better. One finds those kind of personalities in state institutions.As the previous administration is known as the religious one and according to Bible expression of anger is a sin, I wonder if Mr Brown, a son of a religious person has finally liberated himself from some bad habits of keeping it all in.

Samar Singh Discusses " Student Fitness to Practise"

Bare Bones of Student's Fitness to Practise.

For information regarding the manner in which the GMC treats medical students who raise valid concerns about inequality - see www.examfraud.co.uk . Following the piece regarding Professor Timothy David's role in Student Fitness to Practise issues, we present the following as a historical snapshot of how matters have developed. Essentially, Student FtP is a pointless concept that only serves the establishment and not the public.

We refer to the article below first published in the Times Higher Educational Supplement on the 21st July 2006. Following the furore regarding medical student regulation, we felt it was important to turn back the time clock and analyze a number of issues.

"Medics riled by training reforms" Claire Sanders
Published: 21 July 2006 [THES]

Medical schools reacted with alarm this week to news that the General Medical Council could lose its regulatory role for undergraduate education, writes Claire Sanders.

In what is being seen as the biggest shake-up in medical regulation in 150 years, Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, has proposed radical changes to how doctors are assessed and disciplined, many of which will mean a reduced role for the GMC.

The move is in response to criticisms of the GMC by Dame Janet Smith, chair of the inquiry into the Harold Shipman murders.

Katie Petty-Saphon, executive director of the Council of Heads of Medical Schools, said: "The GMC has an outstanding track record in safeguarding the standards of undergraduate medical education and stimulating curriculum reform. This success has been recognised internationally."

Sir Liam is proposing transferring these roles to the newly established Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board. "This will enable the approach to curriculums, standards and inspection in medical education from undergraduate through to postgraduate to be addressed more seamlessly than at present," says his report, Good Doctors, Safer Patients.

Dr Petty-Saphon said: "The training board is a fledgling organisation that is only just getting to grips with major reform of specialty training. It simply lacks the experience and infrastructure to take on regulating undergraduate education, a task the GMC does extremely well."

Medical schools are calling for the role of the GMC to be extended to cover postgraduate training, rather than see a transfer in the other direction. While many of the reforms were widely anticipated, the decision to remove undergraduate education from the GMC took medics by surprise. Sir Graeme Catto, president of the GMC, said: "We had no idea this was on the cards. I have asked Sir Liam if he was dissatisfied in any way with our work and he said 'no'." But what he wrote in his report is in public domain and it makes sense! (Kindly read ‘archive’ on “GMC and medical education (‘Meducation’)” below).

Dr Petty-Saphon added: "The proposed transfer would erode the essential autonomy provided by the current reporting structure." Under the proposals, the GMC will report to Parliament, whereas the board reports to the Department of Health.

The board was set up last year to oversee postgraduate medical education, including the second year of the foundation programme that all medical students undertake in hospitals.

The British Medical Association was also concerned about the proposals, which are out for consultation until November 2006.

Archive on “GMC and medical education (‘Meducation’)”:

Further to the news item in 18th May 2006 issue of Hospital Doctor [‘GMC to advise on ‘student-FTP (Fitness-to-Practise)’] here are , some common-sense observations on GMC’s bungling of medical education in particular & medical regulation in general.

1. Student FTP is a silly misnomer. As everybody except the arrogant clerks at GMC would understand, one doesn’t get ‘license to practise’ until after passing their basic medical qualification examination MB BS or MB ChB, etc., and naturally isn’t fit to practise’ as a medical student. A qualified doctor gets ‘full registration’ only after completion of a year’s supervised practise as PRHO [nowF1]

2. Fitness-to-learn’ (FTL), perhaps? If the GMC (clerks or Catto) meant ‘fitness-to-learn’ (FTL) then this must be the most crackpot concept by GMC to date! Ivory-tower-vultures are wrong again as assessing prospective ‘wannabe’ doctors’ ‘fitness to learn’ is the remit of the universities at the admission stage through UCAS and GMC rightly should have no say in it.

3.Medical Curriculum and educational standards: But of course, under the Medical ‘Act’ the GMC was responsible to set medical curriculum, to supervise and maintain standards of medical education (‘Meducation’) in UK. GMC’s greedy fiasco of exporting PLAB to the third-world over past 10 years resulted in draining young medics from these countries and effectively putting them out of circulation and out of pocket. The GMC were filling their coffers in the style of the colonialist 21st Century East India Company! Sir Liam must be right and seamless regulation of all stages of medical education by one single body makes obvious sense.

4. Back to GMC’s brain-storm of ‘student-FTP’. Students qualify to enter medical schools on their academic grades, then they are like a lump-of-clay in the Meducators’ hands! If the universities couldn’t impart that education to adequate standard, it can be the fault of the system, not the individual and the buck would stop with the University-schools, or again the GMC. It can not be the fault of a student’s ‘fitness to practise’… “studying”; precisely.

5. Even thinking of “judging on any medical student’s fitness-to-practise” is preposterous; and can be compared to diagnosing a newborn baby with ‘feco-urinary (stool-urine) incontinence’, ‘learning disability’, ‘autism’, ‘dyslexia’, ‘ADHD’, etc.’ all at once and then declaring it "unfit to become an adult" in its bare infancy!

We have stalwarts like Count Peter Rubin as the then Chairman of GMC’s Education Committee who mistakes ‘campus-conduct and disciplinary procedures’ as the impossible “medical schools’ current FTP proceedings” for students. Who can blame the GMC clerks for their incompetence?

Perhaps Prof Rubin needs a Frankenstein designed 440 volt to make him understand that a ‘yet-to-be-licensed-to-practise’ medical student can not be ‘danger to public’ any more than any other uni-student ‘trashing the student-bar’!

Mr Irfan Halim was stating the obvious that GMC is unfit for the purpose (see attachment Dame Janet Smith’s lecture before RSM in May 2005, published 2006). There is over 23 years of catalogue of blunders and gaffes in opaque, inconsistent and patently incompetent medical regulation by the GMC since the Medical Act of 1983; to cap with the recent indictment of Prof James Drife, a GMC member, medical screener & Catto’s rival who was found guilty of ‘serious professional misconduct’ of being directly instrumental to Richard Neale’s spate of maiming mayhem up and down England for 14 years.

What did GMC do to Prof James Owen Drife, who gave 2 references to Richard Neale [even without knowing him professionally] and 'screened out' a complaint about the same Neale while sitting as medical screener on the GMC!

Nothing much! They just ousted him from the GMC [to Catto’s relief] which stopped him ‘being a medical screener’! “Protecting patients, or protecting Drife-Neale?”

It goes to prove that subjective professional regulation by the GMC (GentleMen’s Club) in UK-NHS has been strategically protective of the GMC, for the GMC (GentleMen’s Club): people in grey suits with English birth, who fit into the club; including people like Shipman, Neale, Ledward, Kerr, Haslam, Drife, etc.

Time and again, the GMC has failed public and doctors alike. Most of GMC’s significant decisions are overturned by High Court on referral by CHRE, or on appeal; trampling the doctor under multiple jeopardy in the process, funded by doctors alone!

The Shipman Inquiry has found GMC unfit for the purpose of medical regulation [as well as revalidation] and recommended that this should be conducted by ‘anybody but GMC’. Dame Janet Smith has recommended that GMC should be removed from the FTP function which is unconstitutional by its nature, as it breaches doctors’ Human Rights.

This is because the GMC has all 4 functions converged into one body.

These are

(1) the legislative (“Rules on Good Medical Practice”),
(2) the administrative (conducting investigations on doctors in response to complaints from public, NHS-employers and other bodies ---but not from other doctors of junior grade and/or or alien-origin!),
(3) the judicial (subjecting doctors to inquiries on their professional conduct or performance and making findings of ‘serious professional misconduct’-SPM or ‘seriously deficient performance’-SDP; both without any objective definitions or thresholds) and
(4) the executive (suspension or erasure of the doctors from the medical register). In other words, GMC is the kangaroo-court of ‘MP-police- jury- judge-executioner all rolled in one’. This is just like how Saddam Hussain’s rule was in Iraq.

If a shop or a business provided substandard service, consumers could complain to the Trading Standards. With the GMC, they are vastly incompetent but there is no recourse in the law to the wronged. This state of affairs is untenable. The best way forward to end this ‘double jeopardy’ against doctors seems to be by ‘removing the incompetent body GMC --the ‘weakest link’-- from the process of medical regulation. GMC should be abolished.An organisation who cannot get its own house in order is in no position to judge medical students.

As Prof Richard Baker once put it, ‘a fantastic opportunity for the government to make medical regulation more accountable to public’.

All ‘complaints against doctors’ should be processed by CHRE and heard by court judges, so that fairness and transparency are maintained and doctors victimised wrongly could obtain due redress for malicious or unsustained complaints. This could also mean that 100 good testimonials would (as they should) be considered in ruling on an honest mistake or a clinical error, and findings of SPM could be considered ‘spent’ after, say - 5 years.

This would also diffuse the “blame culture” prevalent in medical practice [which could never be entirely free of a certain small amount of unaccountable risk].

Samar Singh

LAWYERS AND CPD (Continuous Professional Development)

I was shocked to discover that in UK lawyers do not have to do more than 16 hours of CPD per year and that in some countries there is no compulsory CPD at all. So if the lawyers are living in the darkness like mushrooms, is it really good for them or the public?

While some lawyers have managed to defend themselves as not having a prescribed form like doctors, I think, 16 hours a year is a joke.

It is a bit like keeping women uneducated for centuries, except that today's lawyers have at least one university degree.

And as if memory was not an exponential decay curve.

I predict that this will change and that in the future lawyers will have at least 40 hours of CPD per year.

Psychiatrists in UK have at least 170 hours of CPD per year and not because we are mad.

Afterall the less one knows the more one is likely to be abused and used. Click on this link and watch.

SCAPEGOATING and WHITE GOAT

So much human energy and lives has been wasted in scapegoating others for deficiencies within the system or individuals in positions of relative authority.

(click on the paragraph above to read more about psychology of scapegoating)

Today in countries where human violence is regulated by law, intimidation and harassment may arrive on written paper, especially for professionals. The written content of scapegoating material is of such low quality that the best use of such paper is to make it into toilet paper.

Now Japanese have finally made it come true for the rest of the world. Click on the link below to watch the video of the White Goat:

I guess, our regulatory authrities could make a good use of it. In fact, there might be a family size one produced soon for every home to have one. No need to guess why.

Maybe, there will be a reduction in the price of toilet paper after elections in many countries, as the demand drops and production increases when wild shredding starts taking place.

12 Complaints against Legal Representatives of the GMC

This is a Freedom of Information Request result that was sent by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority. These statistics are interesting as is the response of the SRA. We have often postulated that the reason that complaints against representatives of the GMC are not taken up is because the SRA employs an an ex GMC henchman as their member. It is difficult to see how the public can have confidence in the SRA's decision making nevertheless in conversation with Anthony Townsend, he denies there is a conflict of interest after his own assessment of the matter in question. He also denies the existence of a list of "difficult doctors" at the GMC. This conflicts with the current statement by a ex GMC Committee member which states

"The GMC dropped the case and Jeffries then reported her to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority BUT the real rub here is that the CE of the SRA is none other than Antony Towsend who from 1991 until 2001 was a senior official investigating docs in the GMC and he especially kept the list of what he described to me as difficult doctors. He went from the GMC to be CE of the Dental Council and then onto the SRA"

Freedom of Information Request - Our Ref: FOI/BS/326

I write further to my emails of 13 and 14 January 2010.

Please find below the response to your request for information under the Law Society's Freedom of Information Code of Practice ("the Code").

Your request was for the following information regarding Antony Townsend::

Please confirm

1. When he worked at the General Medical Council. The time periods would do. During this period it is rumoured that he had a informal list of doctors who had uncomfortable personalities. Please will Mr Townsend confirm whether this is true or not.

This is personal data and is being withheld under section 16 of the Code

2. During that period please confirm which solicitors at the GMC he had day to day contact with.
This information is not held by the Law Society.

3. In the last 10 years, how many complaints has the SRA or its predecessor received regarding legal representatives of the GMC. If so, what were the outcome of these complaints. Please provide this in a table.

Final Outcome

Complaint/Allegation upheld but no action 1
Complaint/Allegation not Upheld 12
Customer has not responded 1
Complaint outside our jurisdiction 1
Within jurisdiction but investigation declined 2
Grand Total 17

Please see the following explanation to put the information in the above table into context:

The table is limited to those allegations of misconduct where either the subject firm was recorded as the GMC or the subject solicitor was recorded on the SRA database as employed by GMC at the point of the complaint. So it would not include any complaints made about solicitors acting for GMC where they were not employed by the GMC. We do not have a way of identifying solicitors acting for GMC, if they were employed by another firm that was the subject of the complaint. So the table does not include information about solicitors instructed by the GMC.

4. Please outline whether the solicitors complained about in point 3 also worked with Anthony Townsend at the GMC.

This information is not held by the Law Society.

I hope the above information is of use.

Yours sincerely




Bob Stanley
Information Compliance Manager - Legal Services
The Law Society, 113 Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1PL
t: 020 7242 1222 (x4117)
f: 020 7320 5685
www.lawsociety.org.uk
P Go green - keep it on screen

PRAYER DOES NOT WORK

Yet another case of a child dying because prayer was used instead of the medical treatment. Click on this link to read about the case in Oregon.

The above event reminded me of the General Medical Council in UK as a religiously biased body where religious fanatics can exercise their power over doctors, remove them from the workforce and kill patients as a consequence. They sit as members of Fitness to Practice Committee and decide on doctors registration which is an essential legal requirement to practice as a doctor.

There is religious bias in British courts too. Ms Cherie Booth QC is a subject of complaints and investigation by Office of Judicial Complaints (OCJ) because of her conduct of Miah case. Click on link below to read more about Miah case:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245506/Cherie-Blair-spares-violent-queue-rage-thug-religious-man.html

However, medical profession's regulatory body does nothing to repair the damage done to innocent doctors caused by their own Fitness to Practice members.

A doctor who judged me at my Fitness to Practice hearing wrote in his book how he prayed for his patient in his surgery for her chronic headache, shivered violently, felt something cold skid across the floor and leave the room. A demon, presumably. He also wrote about his belief that demons cause epilepsy. He has been left with unblemished GMC record, I assume, and is free to go and work anywhere in the world.

Those doctors who declare their conflicts of interests that should exclude them from the hearing process at the General Medical Council in London carry on for many years at GMC and elsewhere.
The same applies to those who do not declare their conflict of interests but should. These doctors can practice and earn millions completely unafraid that they would ever have to face justice.

Thinking is not illegal and neither is acting responsibly.

Injustice to Insurers, Zurich

I cannot believe just how slow I have been in realizing what has been done to medical insurers by medical profession.

As human being when we are ill we want the best medical care there is. Doctors have a duty to act in the best interests of patients and this would include excluding those doctors whose performance is poor so that the best possible medical care is available at all times.

However, when doctor is wrongly accused and mobbed by those doctors who are less capable, jealous, vindictive mobbing has occurred. Excellent doctors have been kicked out by their own profession by further incompetence at the General Medical Council. This is particularly true in the cases of vulnerable doctors such as foreign doctors in UK.

Doctors have to be insured when practising medicine and Zurich provided insurance to both Medical Protection Society (MPS), Medical Defense Union (MDU) , solicitors and barristers.

What MDU and MPS did was to provide weak defense for the mobbed doctors (or none at all) at the General Medical Council instead of taking the vexatious complainants to court and seeking court order for those doctors to pay court costs, damages and Insurance costs.

It is obvious that in the case of a mobbed doctor insurers would be reluctant to pay several times huge sums of money for the mobbed doctor and for the mobbers who would all seek from insurers to pay their lawyers.

Psychologists and sociologist know that when something horrible happens to a person (eg severe burns causing disfiguring of face) they are perceived by normal human beings as likely to have been less attractive BEFORE they got burns.

Beautiful people when exposed to the same imaginary injustice (without any disfiguring) as less attractive people are perceived by normal people to have suffered greater injustice. In other words beautiful people have suffered more, in the minds of the normal people performing psychological testing.

Psychologists found that attractiveness is also related to self perception and that there are people who are xenophobic. Research by medical doctors in UK has found racism in medical profession.

Medical care in UK depends on foreign doctors, and science is international as are the insurers who provide global services.

Therefore, doctors should be made personally accountable for the damages they have caused to insurers and their victims.