One of the doctors who was suspended from work at North Staffordshire Hospital, Stoke on Trent, because of complaints by parents over the diagnosis of child abuse, is to be reinstated, it was announced last week.
Dr Martin Samuels, a consultant paediatrician, who was suspended in November 1999, because of complaints by parents of harassment and victimisation, has been cleared of "professional misconduct or incompetence" by a hospital inquiry.
Dr Samuels's colleague Professor David Southall, who was suspended at the same time, remains suspended because the allegations against him are more complicated. The trust said that the additional time taken to resolve Professor Southall's case "reflects only a greater volume of work that needs to be undertaken in his case and is not indicative of any likely outcome."
Both doctors were also the subject of a separate investigation into a research trial involving the use of a new ventilator for premature babies. The government's inquiry into that trial—in response to complaints from a separate group of parents that they had not given proper consent—found that there were serious shortcomings in the way it was conducted and supervised (BMJ 2000;320:1291).
In an article in the BMJ Dr Edmund Hey, a retired paediatrician from Newcastle upon Tyne and Dr Iain Chalmers, director of the UK Cochrane Centre, Oxford, criticised the inquiry into the trial for its inadequate procedures and called on the NHS Executive to retract the report (BMJ 2000;321:752).
North Staffordshire Trust said that Dr Samuels's suspension was not related to the ventilator trial but only to his responsibilities in the detection of child abuse.
The child abuse work, in which the two consultants were involved, included the use of covert video surveillance of suspected abusers. As a result of their work, several parents were found to have Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, a disorder in which parents or others harm children in order to get medical attention.