At ten o’clock this morning (Mon Feb 15), a 24-year-old nurse is due to step into the dock at Nottingham Crown Court for the beginning of a trial which has already been the focus of extraordinary emotion, media interest and political manoeuvre.
Beverley Allitt worked at the district general hospital in Grantham, Lincolnshire as a nurse on the children’s ward, Ward Four. The police say that in the spring of 1991, she murdered four of the children in her care and attempted to murder nine others. She is also accused of attempting to murder an elderly woman and a 14-year-old boy who were not on the ward. She denies all the charges and the trial is expected to run for at least three months.
More than 200 reporters have applied for seats in the courtroom for today’s hearing, and four television documentaries, three books and a mass of newspaper features are being prepared about the case. In the early days of the police inquiry – before tabloid editors reined in their staff – reporters joined in a feeding frenzy around the story and were caught posing as detectives to gather information and pretending to be house buyers in order to gain access to one of the Ward Four families.
The press have been drawn to the case not only by allegations of multiple murder, which remain rare in Britain and particularly rare where women are concerned, but also by the distant scent of anxiety in high places. For this is really two trials.
The first is a straightforward criminal trial in which the jury will have to decide whether the string of incidents on Ward Four was simply an unlucky cluster of natural events or whether there was foul play and, if so, who was responsible. In search of clues to the truth, they will be led deep into the undergrowth of medical science; both sides in the trial have recruited forensic experts from around the world who will attempt to translate their science into the language of the law.
This struggle for the truth will be watched in court by many of the parents of the Ward Four children and by their lawyer, Ann Alexander, a specialist in medical negligence who has issued a writ against the Trent Regional Health Authority. Bev Allitt’s family will not be there; they have been deterred by the relentless attention of the press.
Behind the scenes, however, there is a second trial which began as soon as the children on Ward Four began to fall ill and which is entirely political. In this shadow trial, it is the National Health Service which is in the dock, accused of being so understaffed and overstretched and so thoroughly commercialised that the deaths and near-deaths of 13 children could take place in the heart of an NHS hospital without anyone being able to act.
Although this trial has been running for nearly two years, it has unti now been conducted entirely behind closed doors. In public, the NHS defence has amounted to nothing more than insisting on its right to silence.
The parents of the Ward Four children have been pressing for a public inquiry not only to reveal the full facts about Ward Four but also to study the implications for other hospitals and children’s wards. If they succeed, they will drag the performance of the reformed NHS into the centre of the stage. Trent Regional Health Authority has opposed them, insisting that such an inquiry is unnecessary. It has been working hard to head off the pressure, citing today’s criminal trial as a justification for a strategy of secrecy.
The hospital has refused to discuss the incidents with anyone, even the families of the Ward Four children, who were refused access to their medical notes and were stranded for months with no information as to whether surviving children would suffer permanent damage from their illnesses. Staff have been told not to talk and believe they would be disciplined if they dared to. Trent Regional Health Authority made only one concession to open government: it conducted an internal inquiry into the management of the ward and promised it would publish the results since they did not concern the allegations of crime, then it changed its mind and that, too, was declared secret.
When the Grantham Hospital chaplain tried to hold a memorial service this month for the dead children, he was carpetted and ordered to scrap his plans. The entire chain of command from the manager, down through his assistants, to the sister on the ward has been moved on various pretexts. Every scrap of paperwork that refers to the incidents has been collected and sealed into a room which is secured with iron bars, closed circuit television and electronic digital locks. Staff say that the hospital spent £52,000 from its meagre budget on the room and that its occupants have been seen searching their dinner trolley for hidden bugs.
Two weeks ago, the hospital finalised plans to hand over the management of Ward Four to the Queen’s Medical Centre 20 miles away in Nottingham. No NHS hospital has ever made such a move before. It threatens the jobs of some 40 nurses, three junior doctors and two consultants. And yet throughout six months of planning, the hospital has refused to discuss it with the staff or their unions on the grounds that the trial of Bev Allitt means that the entire ward is “sub judice” and that they would be in contempt of court if they negotiated with the unions.
The regional health authority has sidelined its own public relations department and taken on a plush firm of political lobbyists, Westminster Strategy, who are believed to have been hired on the advice of the Department of Health at a price which already runs into tens of thousands of pounds of public money. Their fee, however, is a secret. Hospital staff believe Westminster Strategy are intervening in the management of the hospital and not merely in its public relations. The company’s brief, however, is also a secret.
The outcome of this political trial remains uncertain. Senior officials at the Department of Health acknowledge that a public inquiry may be inevitable. The former Health Secretary William Waldegrave refused to commit himself. The MP for Grantham, Douglas Hogg, at first declared his support for a public inquiry but has since suggested that he is changing his mind. While the manoeuvring continues, today’s criminal trial marks the beginning of the end of the secrecy around Ward Four and Beverley Allitt.
