Fifteen years ago, Will Powell saw his ten-year-old son die. Within days, he began to suspect that doctors who had looked after the boy had been negligent. He filed a complaint. Within months, he began to suspect that somebody was tampering with the boy’s medical records. He filed more complaints. He spent 15 years fighting for the truth. Now finally he has it – and he was right.
BRITAIN’S biggest nursing agency is hiring out nurses to hospitals despite complaints that they are incompetent or even mentally unstable.
When a government abuses its power, it does so generally by using an excess of it, to suppress the truth or to crush the opposition or simply to get its own way. In the sad, strange case of the death of Robbie Powell, however, you can see quite clearly how governments are equally capable of abusing their power simply by refusing to use it.
At first, when she walks in to see Dr Dowson, her problem seems quite clear: she has two small boys who are as mad as monkeys. They slide and wrestle around the floor, they yell and scream, they drag anything loose off Dr Dowson’s desk and start a tug-of-war with his stethoscope, while she sits with her shoulders slumped and says that she gets headaches and needs some tablets.
When people are hit by a really devastating disaster, it often seems to happen that instead of giving in to sadness, they elect to feel angry, to become almost consumed by a furious determination to uncover all of the causes of the disaster which has struck them and to punish all of those who were responsible.
Last summer, a couple of months before she died, Georgina Robinson had an odd conversation with her brother, Julian. They were driving home to their parents’ house together and they started talking about Georgina’s work, helping the mentally ill at a small specialist centre in Torbay in south Devon.
Truth was the first casualty on Ward Four after Grantham Hospital finally called in Lincolnshire police to investigate the mysterious deaths and collapses on their childrens’ ward in the Spring of 1991. Yesterday’s report by Sir Cecil Clothier has only partially healed the damage.
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.
