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What Really Happened to Dr Jennifer Colman Index
Chapter One : The Facts behind the Myth It was all Predetermined After Dr Colman’s abortive start in what might be called third rate hospitals, she was employed at Kings College Hospital working for a number of highly respected and world renown consultants. She worked for Mr Leonard Cotton, the Dean of KCH, Mr Hedley Berry, Professor Michael Baum and Professor Kakkar. She also worked for Professor Roger Williams on the Liver Unit. She also attended Mr Cotton’s and Professor William’s private patients. Mr Leonard Cotton knew she had been treated badly and she had been given a good reference for his job from a surgeon of standing who had known Dr Colman for a number of years, and who was therefore able to speak for her in terms of her ability and also on a personal basis. Because Dr Colman was well thought of as a junior at Kings she was given the opportunity to take up a Kings linked surgical post at West Hill Hospital, Dartford, where she worked for Mr Neville Stephens. From there she was appointed to a London Teaching Hospital Rotation and was finally on her way to a successful hospital career. This is the letter which Mr Stephens wrote for Dr Colman’s solicitor when she was facing the GMC: However Dr Colman received the following letter from the GMC in July 1986, just as she was about to take up a career post on the London Teaching Hospital Rotation: This was the first time the GMC had contacted Dr Colman having previously trawled for seventeen months in order to try to satisfy Lord Walton’s predetermined view. Mr Edward Fitzgerald QC, an award winning Human Rights barrister, of Doughty Street Chambers, London, acting for Dr Colman, states that the whole story does not add up to serious professional misconduct. Therefore let us let us examine the charges in relation to the screening papers and see how much substance there was to any of them. Charge 1. The only reference in the Screening notes to this is the entry from Alan Howes on 24 June 1986: “Of itself the alleged depreciation of Dr Correa does not seem
to amount to much, and we have received no complaint direct from Dr Correa.
Nevertheless, if disciplinary proceedings are to be instituted against
Dr C in relation to the general rudeness, it would seem appropriate also
to include an allegation of depreciation of Dr Correa.” It must be remembered that Dr Colman had filled in a questionnaire for Cambridge Clinical School about the deficiencies of her job for training purposes and this included this doctor’s refusal to come to see patient’s although it was his responsibility and to give Dr Colman the cover he should have. This doctor now works at the same hospital as the Chairman of the MPS Council. The MPS are aware that he did not give cover to Dr Colman who was their member. The GMC have a Fitness to Practise File on him which was reviewed by Dame Janet Smith as one of the files she specifically reviewed before she so severely criticised the GMC in her report. Even more worrying about the first Charge is that it is not sustainable as a charge. The doctors who are authors of this document have obtained a letter which Dr Colman wrote to her solicitor on 21 September 2005. This is the letter: Charge 2 was dismissed. Dr Colman had no patient fitting this description. She was a junior surgeon and never carried an arrest bleep at that time and there were no patient notes ever produced. In spite of this the GMC brought the charge without the benefit of any notes. Charge 3. This is probably one of the more serious charges that would ever been levelled at any doctor, that that doctor did not visit a patient. However when Dr Colman saw the screening notes in December 2005 she saw that there had been no patient but instead a visitor and the first entry concerning the third charge was made on 30 July 1985, when Robert Gray wrote about the visitor in the screening note to John Walton: “the only information, apart from a certain amount of tactlessness and brusque manner towards patients, which we have about the quality of care afforded by Dr Colman-Archer is that in the statement flagged G, and the supporting statements below it which indicate that Dr Colman-Archer was reluctant to take appropriate action when a visitor to the hospital in Mansfield suffered a heart attack. Her reaction may of course be engendered partly by her feeling of inadequacy in the circumstances of the case. Further the patient had not been formally admitted and therefore to a certain extent Dr Colman-Archer could perhaps claim that she had no formal professional relationship with or professional responsibilities towards that particular patient.” A year later the GMC elevated the visitor to the status of a patient for the purposes of preferring charges and bolstering a case against Dr Colman. Dr Colman had no knowledge that the patient had been a visitor and that the GMC knew this at the time of the charges. Not only that but when Dr Colman visited the visitor, whom no nurse could tell her anything about, she was lying fully clothed on a bed and Dr Colman admitted and treated her and for the remainder of her time as an in patient no one ever told Dr Colman how the admission had come about. Even more worrying was the fact that the GMC never requested the Hospital Notes otherwise they would have seen that Dr Colman was the admitting doctor for a visitor who by definition had never been referred and Dr Colman’s own private solicitor had to prise the notes out of the Trust via the GMC just prior to a hearing scheduled for December 1986. The GMC’s solicitors had written to the Hospital assuring them that the notes would not be needed and the GMC had already charged Dr Colman. It was a rare chance that the visitor had ended up on a ward covered by Dr Colman, when she had been visiting a patient on a different ward. Dr Colman has now discovered that the nurses on the ward where the visitor was visiting, not wanting to call their own doctor placed the visitor in a wheel chair and pushed her to Dr Colman’s ward and dumped her there. Undoubtedly the Hospital expected repercussions and decided it was easier to victimise Dr Colman who as a Pre-Registration House Officer was the most junior doctor on call that Saturday evening and did the right thing by calling her registrar to attend with her in this wholly unusual situation. However what the GMC did was to trick Dr Colman by not informing her that they knew that the person in Charge 3 was not a patient but a visitor. They acted unfairly and misrepresented matters to Dr Colman and thereby victimised her. On 24 June 1986 Alan Howes wrote to Gray about Dr Colman under a number of headings. He wrote of Charge 3: “It has to be remembered that Dr Colman is only provisionally registered, and one would assume that the standards to be expected of a provisionally registered doctor are somewhat less stringent than the standards one might expect of a senior general practitioner or hospital consultant. One therefore cannot judge a case such as this by the same standards as for example allegations that a general practitioner has failed to visit and treat a patient….I would question whether the evidence is sufficiently dire to warrant an allegation of serious professional misconduct.” He also said: “If [the president] is minded to institute conduct proceedings in relation to this issue, it seems to me that such proceedings would be unlikely to get very far unless a number of incidents were to be alleged against Dr Colman-Archer in the Rule 6 letter. I think it would be insufficient, for example, merely to tax her over what occurred in relation to Mrs XXXXXX.” Underlining is Alan Howes’s Charge 4 is based on a supposed exchange between Dr Colman and Sister Mary Burden in a private office. The evidence given by another nurse shows that Sister Burden was rude to Dr Colman, which she admits- however the most important thing to note here is that the transcript of that hearing shows that Sister Burden said she had never given a statement to the GMC and she still maintains as that to be the case 20 years later. That in itself is remarkable and goes to the heart of what Dr Colman and others have always maintained that Health Authorities have habitually used the GMC as an instrument to ruin doctors who take Health Authorities to court for breach of their contracts as Dr Colman did. It was all pre-determined On 26 September 1986 Robert Summerling of Le Brasseur, retained by the Medical Protection Society to represent Dr Colman, had a telephone conversation with Robert Gray of the GMC in which he noted down that Robert Gray had told him that Dr Colman was a psychopath. This is his attendance note: Robert Sumerling never told Dr Colman about this conversation or the note he had made, in spite of the fact that his firm was retained to represent Dr Colman’s interests, and she discovered it incidentally later. This was a crucial matter as Dr Colman’s case was being driven through to a hearing unfairly by John Walton based on his feeling rather than real and cogent evidence and contrary to the views of the GMC staff. The real issue here must be why didn’t Robert Summerling inform his client? When did the Medical Protection Society know of this and what did they do? Another important issue is that Dr Colman and her solicitors have inspected the 1986 Preliminary Proceedings Committee minutes at the GMC’s solicitors. There are no minutes on Dr Colman. She does appear not to have had her case considered at all by the PPC, which in any event was chaired by John Walton who had already made up his mind that Dr Colman was being dispatched and hence he intended to injure her regardless. The GMC invents the procedure of “Sentence before Hearing” Dr Colman also discovered in the papers released in December 2005 that the GMC had operated a hitherto unknown procedure called “Sentence before Hearing” on her. In the papers was a document called “Draft Determination” with a pre-determined sentence of erasure on it. It is the pre-determined sanction which nails this conspiracy down to a foregone conclusion with the intention of irrevocably damaging Dr Colman’s career and wrecking her life. This is the Draft Determination which the GMC had already typed out on Dr Colman and which was placed before the Professional Conduct Committee who were supposed to have acted independently which is extremely questionable under all the circumstances: The handwriting on the Draft Determination is Robert Gray’s Clearly Dr Colman’s Human Rights have been violated by the GMC and those who dealt with her and the 1987 panel, one of whom was Professor Hayhoe, a senior examiner in pathology at Cambridge when Dr Colman was failed in that subject and a member of the Faculty Board of Medicine which did not wish to see Dr Colman allowed to resit her pathology and who eventually managed to successfully exclude Dr Colman from passing with her Final MB. Another member of that PCC was Dr Krishna Korlipara, who sat with Dr Colman as a member of the GMC from 2000-2003, and he continues to sit on the GMC. He told Dr Colman in 2001 that the GMC assistant registrars told the panels what to do. During the period from 2000 to 2003 he was frequently interviewed by Hospital Doctor and other medical magazines when he always held himself out to be an exponent of fairness and justice for doctors. He now remains silent on the topic. This has been a travesty of justice, known to many and they have kept previously kept quiet, preferring to continue to blame Dr Colman alone.
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