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What Really Happened to Dr Jennifer Colman Index
Chapter One : The Facts behind the Myth Employment at Gt Yarmouth & Waveney Health Authority 1. The First Letter about Dr Colman Dr Colman qualified with the title of LMSSA in February 1984, obtained provisional registration immediately and took up a post as Pre-Registration House Officer in surgery with the Gt Yarmouth & Waveney Health Authority at James Paget Hospital, Gorleston. During Dr Colman’s time there Dr Elizabeth Harris also known as Anne Brown acted unlawfully by breaching Dr Colman’s contract when she sent out a covert and untruthful “alert letter” to the Cambridge District Medical Officer on 21 January 1985, thus ensuring others in the region would not employ Dr Colman. Dr Colman had no knowledge of this letter until December 2005 when it was discovered in her Cambridge Clinical School papers and therefore may well be in the GMC papers which they still refuse to give to Dr Colman and her representatives. This is a non-procedural letter and does not satisfy the conditions for an alert letter, but it refers to an earlier “alert” by Dr Harris. Now, in September 2006 the Department of Health has confirmed that they have no record of any alert letter being issued on Dr Colman, and certainly not in 1985, and therefore Dr Colman has always had a clean record with the Department of Health, but not with her Clinical School or in East Anglia because of this letter. Dr Colman also remained working in post without suspension and without any knowledge of Dr Harris’s letter and therefore could not have been seen as a risk to the patients or public and therefore no public interest was served by Dr Harris in sending the letter and the predominant intention of sending an untruthful malicious letter as Dr Harris did was to injure Dr Colman by preventing her from obtaining employment and training as a provisionally registered junior doctor. The whole point of provisional registration is that you will receive training in recognised training posts which qualify one for full registration. Perhaps one of the most bizarre facts is that Dr Colman did not know of Dr Harris’s existence at the time this occurred. 2. The Second Letter about Dr Colman Dr Colman did not know, until 2005 that after she had left James Paget Hospital at the end of her contract Dr Harris wrote a second letter about her on 19 February 1985 to the GMC, in which she claimed wrongly, amongst other things and with no evidence that Dr Colman was suffering from porphyria! Again we state for any avoidance of doubt that there is simply no evidence that Dr Colman is a descendent of King George or anybody else with porphyria and she does not suffer with porphyria. Even if she was, and did, it is a clear breach of medical confidentiality for Dr Harris to be offering any medical details whether true or not to anyone else. Dr Harris had never attended on Dr Colman as her doctor. This unsubstantiated, fantasised allegation by Dr Harris which is totally without foundation was to set the scene for the way in which the GMC subsequently treated Dr Colman in the years to follow. Dr Colman was subsequently labelled by the GMC as someone with a personality disorder, a rumoured diagnosis without any evidence, and which Dr Peter Eames categorically denied to be the case in 1989. She was later described as a psychopath although Dr Colman’s solicitor Robert Summerling of Le Brasseur & Bury now RadcliffesLeBrasseur knew this and did not act to protect Dr Colman at the time. Again this was all kept secret from Dr Colman and sadly is the way in which the GMC prefers to do its business even to the present day. 3. The Third letter about Dr Colman Without knowing about the first letter Dr Colman then wrote to Dr Harris/Brown on 15 March 1985, as the DMO of the authority about her accreditation which Mr Sansom, for whom Dr Colman had worked, had refused on the last day of her job and without any forewarning. Dr Harris did not reply to Dr Colman but sent Dr Colman’s letter to the GMC with her own letter stating that Dr Colman was threatening her which was not the case. Dr Colman had pointed out that Dr Harris might well hear from her solicitor if she refused Dr Colman her accreditation which is not unreasonable. Dr Harris took a pre-emptive strike at Dr Colman for a number of reasons: (1). She feared legal action for breach of contract. (2). She was covering for Mr Sansom and the Health Authority as a relative
Pamela Craik had complained to the HA about her mother’s treatment,
and had then asked Dr Colman to whom she should complain.
This is the letter which Mrs Craik wrote to Peter Tower’s at the GMC in which she described James Paget’s local reputation in 1987 and Dr Colman as the only shining light. (3). Dr Colman had complained on a number of occasions about the unsafe working conditions and about the Senior House Officer, Dr Jonathan Correa, who consistently refused to give cover even though that was his job in the absence of registrars. Dr Walters wrote of Dr Correa’s attitude and told Dr Colman to record his refusal to attend in the patient’s notes and nurses also recorded it in their Cardexes. Dr Colman also made the position known to her Clinical School through a feedback questionnaire. However they were hurriedly covering their own backs as the GMC had grave concerns about Cambridge Clinical School and thought that did not offer an adequate training in some fields of expertise and were considering whether to withdraw their approval from Cambridge for training purposes. It cannot have gone down at all well when Dr Colman’s feedback questionnaire was seen by Thomas Sherwood. Dr Harris knew about Dr Colman’s concerns over Dr Correa and even told the GMC but there was no censure of Dr Correa either by Dr Harris or the GMC, in spite of the evidence which they consistently buried. The moral or this is that you may neglect your patients and get away free but if you complain about poor patient care and non-attendance of your colleagues then you will be dealt with severely by those in positions of power. They may well irrevocably wreck your career and your whole life as they did in this case. There was no evidence to substantiate Dr Harris’s letters other than a handwritten note which she had solicited from a senior nurse, Vanessa Wood, in March 1985, who wrote that she had no first hand knowledge. There was evidence of Dr Correa’s poor performance however and Dr Harris had mentioned it to the GMC. Therefore Dr Harris’s intended to do Dr Colman harm and the subsequent actions taken by her and Professor Sherwood in conjunction with John Walton and Robert Gray were with the express intention of harming Dr Colman and depriving her of her livelihood. 4. The telephone call about Dr Colman Dr Harris then telephoned the GMC on number of occasions during the spring of 1985 to pass on wholly erroneous gossip about Dr Colman, whom she had never met, and Dr Colman’s private life and her family which she gossiped totally inappropriately about and the content of her conversations with Robert Gray shows that she thought Dr Colman was in someway privileged and her fantasies were noted down by Robert Gray. In particular she telephoned the GMC on 17 July 1985 and told them it was her view that Dr Colman was mentally ill and a lesbian, neither of which is true. This is the note of the telephone conversation which the GMC added to the screening notes for consideration by their staff and John Walton: The GMC conspired with her in this disgusting and scurrilous gossip and must have treated it as truth as they placed it in the screening notes for consideration although by now it should have become clear to any right thinking person in the GMC that Dr Harris/Brown could not be relied upon and might well be fantasising at best and malicious at worst. As lesbianism was classified as a sexual deviance under the DSM classification in 1985, and mental illness is generally seen as a stigma then Dr Harris’s predominant intention with her scandalous unsupported assertions must have been to influence the GMC in their deliberations and to injure Dr Colman. Again and for the avoidance of doubt Dr Colman was not and is not mentally ill and neither is she a lesbian. More worrying to everyone who has dealings with the GMC is the prurient and smutty behaviour of the GMC and certain of its staff. More of this same theme later for Dr Colman was to find they were still considering her as a lesbian and making fun of her behind her back in this respect in 2000.
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