The Annual General Meeting of the society was held on April 6th 2005 at the Royal Southampton Yacht Club. The President was in the chair.
Before proceeding with the meeting a minute’s silence was held in the memory of Dr Eldon Stowell.
The President then introduced the evening’s speaker Dr John Grenville, Secretary of the Derbyshire LMC, and GP member of the Shipman enquiry. Dr Genville spoke to the title: ‘The Fallout from the Shipman Enquiry’
He briefly described the court case in which Shipman had put up no defence challenging the prosecution to prove the case for murder and how he came to be involved.
He described the background to The Shipman Enquiry, conducted by Dame Janet Smith DBE,[the discovery of unexplained morphine in large quantities in the bodies of patients who died suddenly in Dr Shipman’s presence, when they had no reason to die,] and he went on to discuss some aspects of Dame Janet’s reports. [He considered that Dame Janet had exceeded the terms of her enquiry in trying to have a root and branch enquiry into General Practice in this country and becoming involved in revalidation.]
He said that in 3rd Reporton Death Certification, she came to the same conclusion as a previous Home Office enquiry: that the present rules were too lax. Dame Janet’s enquiry proposedthat that there should be a 3 stage death certification:
1 Someone must record having seen the body and describing its appearance and position.
2 A doctor who knows patient should give an opinion as the cause of death including history, medication, and certainty of diagnosis, and
3 a new branch to the profession to review deaths: does the evidence fit the case?
The Home Office took a year to produce a position paper in reply in which they state any changes will be within resources available.
In the 4th Report Dame Janet wanted every dose of DDA recorded from manufacture, through administration to patient and destruction of unused drug recorded on a chip on each vial. This is too expensive and won’t happen. It may be possible to track batches of controlled drugs. There may be more regulations concerning the disposal of DDAs. The doctor cant take them away because in law the drug belongs to the dead patient’s estate andthe executors of his estate are not legally empowered to supply DDAs to the doctor for him to do so.
In the 5th Report Dame Janet’s approach was that all Drs are undetected mass murderers and that there should be structures in place to find them before the doctor commits his first murder. We are, Dr Grenville said, already heavily regulated and should expect to be more so. Why? Because we are in a position of huge power over the patient: we could murder them or sexually assault them [they get undressed without question though the patient could refuse]. We need to be able to prove we did something with good reason. In Dr Grenville’s opinion Dame Janet has taken this to an extreme and the Department of Health is not keen to implement her recommendations.
But doing nothing is not an option he concluded.
The President then thanked the speaker for his interesting and stimulating lecture and how impressed he was by his ability to deliver this talk without any notes.
The meeting then proceeded to the AGM of the society.