I must thank Penny Mellor for reading the BMJ for me. She may be many things but she does spot media articles. When spotting said media articles she becomes much like a wolf hound sniffing out the articles and producing them on her website.
I find the BMJ rather boring to say the least. Someone has to read it, it might as well be an ex prisoner like Penny Mellor.
I see Fiona Godlee [Editor of the BMJ] has given Rod Griffiths further oxygen of publicity. Not only is he a negligent researcher but he lies at the drop of a hat. Prof Rod Griffiths can sue me if he wishes, I shall be ready for it anytime or anyday. To summarise this, Professor Rod Griffiths used to be Director of Public Health in the West Midlands. He was investigator in the Southall case eg the now discredited Griffiths Inquiry. The findings in the Nottingham Study and the Henshall case are opposite to the Griffiths Inquiry.
Griffiths was also the GMC investigator for Ward 87 North Staffordshire NHS Trust. During the investigation, David Fillingham the Chief Executive attempted to get Griffiths to refer me to the GMC in the year 2000. Griffiths did not do this but did do Fillingham a favour. According to Sarah Bedwell of the GMC, Griffiths had raised concerns about my alleged mental health problems. Griffiths denies this. Then he denies the time of day. The audit into Ward 87 were diametically opposite to the findings in the 2001 Report by John Creamer. Essentially, Rod Griffiths had lied. He told the GMC that " there was no evidence to substantiate my concerns". This is what prompted the GMC to commence a covert investigation into my so called mental health issues. Of course, there were never any mental health issues. The GMC later apologised to me via Blake Dobson and that incident resolved through the GMC's most embarassing litigation to date.
Edmund Hey et al may be all polite about Rod Griffiths but we have to remember that none of the members of PACA had the guts to refer Professor Rod Griffiths to the GMC. They did though spend extensive amounts of time debating the issue politely while David Southall was getting deeper and deeper into hot water.
I have published the recent two articles from the BMJ [ courtesy of resident BMJ sniffer hound Penny Mellor] .
Rod Griffiths slithers away because he has now been shown up to be an incompetent researcher. I know this because I made a GMC complaint about Professor Griffiths. The antics can be read here. The allegations listed by the General Medical Council summarises these issues I raised. The GMC though did their best to prevent the matter from reaching court or any hearing. The GMC threw it out the first time. I beat the Department of Health Lawyers at Rule 12 Presidential Review. The matter was taken through the procedures yet again.
During that period the GMC wrote the following allegations
I threatened to judicially review this case but during this threat, the GMC conveniently instigated a complaint against me and lost me my job.
During this complaint
1. I was not allowed access to the full 2001 Dr Creamer Document. The playground farce detailing Toni Smerdon [ GMC Lawyers] game of pass the parcel is detailed here.
2. The GMC Refused to obtain documents from North Staffordshire NHS Trust. This is contrary to the ruling in Henshall.
3. The GMC overlooked the blatant dishonesties during Griffith's submissions. This included outright lies propagated by his legal representatives from the Department of Health.
4. The GMC refused to consider the matters listed below despite the fact I had raised them as evidence of repeated and similar conduct. His research misconduct was overlooked by the GMC.
Anyhow, as I am not one to give up, the matter has gone to Rule 12 Presidential Review again following disclosure of reports and various other findings. Let us see whether the GMC puts its money where its mouth is.
Joan Trowell Chair of Fitness to Practice
There is a certain irony of Rod Griffiths having an email address containing the word " demon". Yes, we know he flies on the dark side. We know that he and his mate Professor Temple concealed the truth from the GMC and every other authority. Of course, after all these years, it's the dirty little secrets that float out online that are troublesome for him to defend.
Latest from the BMJ.
Published 31 October 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2347
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2347
Views & Reviews
Personal View
On drinking from a poisoned chalice
Rod Griffiths, president, Faculty of Public Health rod@stonebow.demon.co.uk
For a period in the late 1990s there were repeated headlines about research on children in North Staffordshire NHS Trust using continuous negative extrathoracic pressure (CNEP). They alleged that excessive deaths had occurred. As regional director of public health I had already commented to the media that premature babies of that age had a significant mortality and that the children in the trial had fared no worse that expected. Public health passed the story to the research and development directorate. The story did not go away and local MPs took it up. A meeting with the relevant minister and one of the MPs took place. The director of research and development should have gone, but he was in America. The minister wanted someone from the regional office to be present. I went.
By the time of the meeting formal complaints had already been made both to the General Medical Council and to the trust. To my surprise the minister asked a new, though not unreasonable, question: could there be a problem with the governance system, at that trust or in general? I was the regional director of public health, and I came out of the meeting having agreed to do a low key review to look at the system. Lesson one: poisoned chalices are easy to pick up. After the review was announced new patient groups appeared, complaining about what was then known as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, nothing to do with our terms of reference, but they were persistent in lobbying the minister’s office. It would have been excessively complex to have commissioned yet another inquiry, so this was added to the task that we were asked to do. Lesson two: when drinking from poisoned chalices, try to avoid top-ups. We hired a team that interviewed everyone who wanted to give evidence and appointed a panel with relevant expertise. We reviewed all the statements and decided which individuals or groups we needed to interview in person. We set up dates to take oral evidence and spent several days doing that. A number of potential witnesses were prepared to give evidence only on condition that their statements would not be made public. Of course when we reported, it made it easy for others to say, "Where did they get that idea from?"
Some of the evidence that was given in confidence was important and without it we would have had a less complete picture, but it did make the review easier to criticise. Lesson three: if you have to drink from a poisoned chalice, better to do it in full public view if you can. We were told many diverse stories about some issues, both in relation to research and in relation to child abuse. They could not all be true but documentation did not exist to verify one consistent story. We had to conclude that the essential question raised by the minister had some validity—there did seem to be something the matter with the system. Accordingly we recommended that research governance needed a better system; that child protection needed clearer guidance about possible fabricated illness; that consent needed clearer guidance; and that there should be a way of reporting supposed adverse events from all treatments, not just drugs. We also concluded that parents really needed to know if CNEP in neonates did damage or not.
Short of a new randomised control trial it seemed that funding a longer term follow-up might give the answer. Marlow et al have now completed the review that we commissioned (Lancet 2006;367:1080, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)68475-4); it shows that CNEP was associated with no more damage than control treatments. Several months after we reported and ministers accepted all our recommendations, we were roundly attacked in the BMJ (BMJ 2000;321:715-6, doi:10.1136/bmj.321.7263.715). I can’t think of anything I have found more uncomfortable than that weekend. Worse still was having to speak on the Monday at a conference on a different subject, wondering just how many in the audience had read that week’s BMJ. Lesson four: when drinking from poisoned chalices, don’t expect the effects to wear off quickly. It is easy with hindsight to think of ways in which we could have been given different terms of reference, spent more money, done things differently. Commenting on the detail at this distance seems pointless but I do agree with those who say that a body is needed that can either investigate complaints about research or advise on the subject. Had such a body existed at that time, however, I still think it would have come to similar conclusions. We do need governance systems that protect patients and provide safe circumstances for research to prosper. Both are essential, but neither was guaranteed by the systems in place before we reported. No doubt the current system could be improved, but we do need a system or there will be more inquiries.
Finally, does drinking from the poisoned chalice do any good—is it good for the soul, the personal development and all that? Do you develop a thicker skin, making you tougher and more able to take poison in the future? I think not. I feel more vulnerable and easier to hurt as a result of the experience, though that may be a good thing. People who are in senior positions need thin skins, not thick ones. So lesson five for poisoned chalices is simple: when handed one, drink up and smile—it goes with the job.
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2347
An appreciation of Professor Griffiths' identification of a poisoned chalice 31 October 2008 Iain Chalmers, Editor, James Lind Library James Lind Initiative, OX2 7LG, Edmund Hey Send response to journal: Re: An appreciation of Professor Griffiths' identification of a poisoned chalice
We write to express our appreciation of, and thanks to, Professor Rod Griffiths for publishing (1, 2) his perspectives on the events triggered by allegations that the trial of Continuous Negative Extrathoracic Pressure (CNEP) undertaken in neonates in Stoke on Trent was so flawed that it amounted to serious professional misconduct.
Everything we have come to know about this saga has made it clear that many of the allegations of misconduct had little to do with the CNEP trial and a lot to do with a determined campaign to destroy doctors who had been involved in child protection work, particularly David Southall and Martin Samuels.
As Professor Griffiths reports, once Ministers had agreed that an enquiry into the CNEP trial should take place, campaigners came out of the woodwork and demanded that the terms of reference of the enquiry be extended to investigate the child protection work done by these two paediatricians – in Professor Griffiths’ apt language, to top up the poisoned chalice that he had been handed. We agree wholeheartedly with Professor Griffiths’ conclusion that “if you have to drink from a poison chalice, better to do it in full public view.” We can also agree with him that, had a body capable of investigating complaints about research in public been in existence eight years ago, it might well “have come to similar conclusions” to his panel about the need for a more effective system of research governance.
Given Professor Griffiths’ views now on the CNEP trial (2), we are confident that he agrees with us that a thorough, public investigation would have been highly unlikely to have found fault with the way the CNEP trial was conducted. However, as we have made clear in our commentary in the Lancet (3), allegations of forged consent forms made behind closed doors continue to hang over the heads of 34 doctors who were providing neonatal care in Stoke on Trent during the early 1990s. No evidence to support these allegations has yet been made public. If consent forms were forged that is a scandal; if they were not then the allegations were false and highly derogatory and damaging (4). Although we believe that the Department of Health is largely to blame for the failure to ensure natural, transparent justice in this affair, matters would not have got so completely out of hand after the Department’s report appeared had some of the paediatricians most critical of the clinicians in Stoke been required to defend their opinions in public then and there. This observation applies particularly to Professor Terry Stacey, one of the three members of Professor Griffiths’ enquiry team (who was appointed to direct the Central Office for Research Ethics Committees soon after this report was completed), and to Richard Nicholson, Editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, who has declared confidently that CNEP was used in research without parental consent (5). The clinicians in Stoke should be assumed to be innocent of this charge unless a proper investigation, conducted in public, reveals otherwise. Iain Chalmers and Edmund Hey References 1 Griffiths R. On drinking from a poisoned chalice. bmj.com, 1 April 2006. 2 Griffiths R. CNEP and research governance. Lancet 2006;367:1037–8. 3 Hey E, Chalmers I. Are any of the criticisms of the CNEP trial true? Lancet 2006;367:1032–3. 4 Hey E. The 1996 Continuous Negative Extrathoracic Pressure (CNEP) trial: were parents’ allegations of research fraud fraudulent? (in press) [Subsequently published in Pediatrics 2006;117;2244-2246] 5 Nicholson R. Editorial. Bulletin of Medical Ethics May 2003, p 1. Competing interests: None declared Editor’s note: This response was submitted in April 2006, but technical problems relating to the fact that the article which it was responding to had been posted as a webextra article meant that the response couldn't be displayed.
See editor's footnote to that article for further explanation - http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/oct31_2/a2347 This article has now been republished as a stand alone article, making it possible to post rapid responses to it.
I find the BMJ rather boring to say the least. Someone has to read it, it might as well be an ex prisoner like Penny Mellor.
I see Fiona Godlee [Editor of the BMJ] has given Rod Griffiths further oxygen of publicity. Not only is he a negligent researcher but he lies at the drop of a hat. Prof Rod Griffiths can sue me if he wishes, I shall be ready for it anytime or anyday. To summarise this, Professor Rod Griffiths used to be Director of Public Health in the West Midlands. He was investigator in the Southall case eg the now discredited Griffiths Inquiry. The findings in the Nottingham Study and the Henshall case are opposite to the Griffiths Inquiry.
Griffiths was also the GMC investigator for Ward 87 North Staffordshire NHS Trust. During the investigation, David Fillingham the Chief Executive attempted to get Griffiths to refer me to the GMC in the year 2000. Griffiths did not do this but did do Fillingham a favour. According to Sarah Bedwell of the GMC, Griffiths had raised concerns about my alleged mental health problems. Griffiths denies this. Then he denies the time of day. The audit into Ward 87 were diametically opposite to the findings in the 2001 Report by John Creamer. Essentially, Rod Griffiths had lied. He told the GMC that " there was no evidence to substantiate my concerns". This is what prompted the GMC to commence a covert investigation into my so called mental health issues. Of course, there were never any mental health issues. The GMC later apologised to me via Blake Dobson and that incident resolved through the GMC's most embarassing litigation to date.
Edmund Hey et al may be all polite about Rod Griffiths but we have to remember that none of the members of PACA had the guts to refer Professor Rod Griffiths to the GMC. They did though spend extensive amounts of time debating the issue politely while David Southall was getting deeper and deeper into hot water.
I have published the recent two articles from the BMJ [ courtesy of resident BMJ sniffer hound Penny Mellor] .
Rod Griffiths slithers away because he has now been shown up to be an incompetent researcher. I know this because I made a GMC complaint about Professor Griffiths. The antics can be read here. The allegations listed by the General Medical Council summarises these issues I raised. The GMC though did their best to prevent the matter from reaching court or any hearing. The GMC threw it out the first time. I beat the Department of Health Lawyers at Rule 12 Presidential Review. The matter was taken through the procedures yet again.
During that period the GMC wrote the following allegations
Professor Griffiths - Annex AThis finally went to case examiners who promptly threw it out but agreed with a number of points I had alleged. The audience can read the findings here. In a nutshell, Professor Rod Griffiths had compromised patient care, had misled the GMC and had shut down any further investigation. During the GMC investigation into his conduct his fibs began to escalate considerably. He then started to flount his CBE as evidence of his so called honesty. I have no doubts that the GMC was under pressure to throw the complaint out and they did. The decision was a "appease Rita" decision. A kind of " We agree with you but you will never prove it".
Case reference: HH/FPD/2004/1056
That being registered under the Medical Act 1983 (as amended),
1. In April 2000, you were a Regional Director of Public Health for the West Midlands;
2. You were asked by the GMC to lead an investigation into allegations made to it earlier that month by Dr Pal of malpractice and sub-standard facilities and care at the City General Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent (“the hospital”), especially on ward 87, part of the University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust (“the Trust”), where she had worked as a doctor;
3. In January 2001 your report concluded, broadly, that Dr Pal’s allegations were misplaced;
4. a. On 27 April 2000, in the context of your investigation, you met Sarah Bedwell of the GMC and made the following, or similar, statements:
“[Dr Pal] should possibly have been more competent and knowledgeable than she appears to have been.”
“It may be that some of the problems arose because her own performance was sub-standard.”
b. You made these statements even though you had not investigated Dr Pal’s performance as a doctor;
c. At the same or another meeting with Sarah Bedwell and/or other GMC staff you raised concerns about Dr Pal’s physical and/or mental health, although you had not investigated this;
d. All/any of those three statements were dishonest and/or reckless and/or careless because you had not taken reasonable steps to verify them or put yourself in a position properly to assess Dr Pal’s competence or knowledge as a doctor or her physical and/or mental health,
e. By making these statements, you purposely sought to undermine and/or discredit Dr Pal,
f. Accordingly, you acted contrary to paragraphs 34, 35 and 51 of Good Medical Practice;
5. a. Your report’s conclusions about the practices and the standards of facilities and care of patients at the hospital were wrong and you dishonestly and/or recklessly and/or carelessly misled the GMC in this regard,
b. In particular, no reasonable doctor could have concluded that EP had not been neglected while a patient (especially from reading merely her medical records): see, especially, page 18, paragraph 33b of New Doctor,
c. Your intention was to undermine and/or discredit Dr Pal rather than to consider the evidence and report objectively,
d. Accordingly, you acted contrary to paragraph 34, 35 and 51 of Good Medical Practice.
6. a. In a letter dated 17 January 2005, submitted to the GMC on your behalf by Zahida Ramzan-Asghar, it was stated in relation to the missing drip set needed by Dr Pal to treat Evelyn Price that:
“An alternative available to the Complainant (i.e. Dr Pal) was to call a crash team herself and not leave the patient. The crash team would have had a drip set and would have provided more experience.”
b. This statement was misleading as you knew, or should have known, that crash teams do not routinely carry drip sets and it is contrary to accepted protocol to summon a crash team when the patient is not suffering from actual cardiac or respiratory arrest;
7. a. Your report was flawed by an undisclosed conflict of interest as it was in your interests and/or the interests of bodies for which you worked for your report to conclude, broadly, that Dr Pal’s allegations were misplaced. The more your report was critical of NHS practices or personnel, the more likely it was that NHS funds would be withheld or limited;
b. In particular, the conflict of interest arose through, and/or was accentuated by, your close association with Professor John Temple (the then Postgraduate Dean of the West Midlands Deanery), your involvement with the Service Increment for Teaching (“SIFT”) Joint Planning Committee and the threat posed by Dr Pal’s allegations to the hospital’s planned application for Pre Registration House Officer (PRHO) rotation,
c. Accordingly, you acted contrary to paragraphs 54 and 55 of Good Medical Practice;
8. a. You and the Trust accepted that there had been some deficiencies in practices, facilities and care of patients at the hospital, especially on ward 87, although you considered that efforts had been made to address them,
b. Nonetheless you dishonestly and/or recklessly and/or carelessly failed to mention and/or stress those acknowledged deficiencies in your report,
c. Your report ignored and/or minimised these deficiencies,
d. Accordingly, you acted contrary to paragraphs 26-27 of Good Medical Practice.
I threatened to judicially review this case but during this threat, the GMC conveniently instigated a complaint against me and lost me my job.
During this complaint
1. I was not allowed access to the full 2001 Dr Creamer Document. The playground farce detailing Toni Smerdon [ GMC Lawyers] game of pass the parcel is detailed here.
2. The GMC Refused to obtain documents from North Staffordshire NHS Trust. This is contrary to the ruling in Henshall.
3. The GMC overlooked the blatant dishonesties during Griffith's submissions. This included outright lies propagated by his legal representatives from the Department of Health.
4. The GMC refused to consider the matters listed below despite the fact I had raised them as evidence of repeated and similar conduct. His research misconduct was overlooked by the GMC.
Anyhow, as I am not one to give up, the matter has gone to Rule 12 Presidential Review again following disclosure of reports and various other findings. Let us see whether the GMC puts its money where its mouth is.
Joan Trowell Chair of Fitness to Practice
"The GMC’s key priority is to make its procedures fair and free from discrimination. Its reforms also emphasise prompt and effective investigation into serious concerns.” (October 04)So while Edmund Hey is playing with his words on the BMJ and wafting it around the posher sectors of PACA, some of us do the real work that is required to get Professor Griffiths off the shop floor.
There is a certain irony of Rod Griffiths having an email address containing the word " demon". Yes, we know he flies on the dark side. We know that he and his mate Professor Temple concealed the truth from the GMC and every other authority. Of course, after all these years, it's the dirty little secrets that float out online that are troublesome for him to defend.
Latest from the BMJ.
Published 31 October 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2347
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2347
Views & Reviews
Personal View
On drinking from a poisoned chalice
Rod Griffiths, president, Faculty of Public Health rod@stonebow.demon.co.uk
For a period in the late 1990s there were repeated headlines about research on children in North Staffordshire NHS Trust using continuous negative extrathoracic pressure (CNEP). They alleged that excessive deaths had occurred. As regional director of public health I had already commented to the media that premature babies of that age had a significant mortality and that the children in the trial had fared no worse that expected. Public health passed the story to the research and development directorate. The story did not go away and local MPs took it up. A meeting with the relevant minister and one of the MPs took place. The director of research and development should have gone, but he was in America. The minister wanted someone from the regional office to be present. I went.
By the time of the meeting formal complaints had already been made both to the General Medical Council and to the trust. To my surprise the minister asked a new, though not unreasonable, question: could there be a problem with the governance system, at that trust or in general? I was the regional director of public health, and I came out of the meeting having agreed to do a low key review to look at the system. Lesson one: poisoned chalices are easy to pick up. After the review was announced new patient groups appeared, complaining about what was then known as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, nothing to do with our terms of reference, but they were persistent in lobbying the minister’s office. It would have been excessively complex to have commissioned yet another inquiry, so this was added to the task that we were asked to do. Lesson two: when drinking from poisoned chalices, try to avoid top-ups. We hired a team that interviewed everyone who wanted to give evidence and appointed a panel with relevant expertise. We reviewed all the statements and decided which individuals or groups we needed to interview in person. We set up dates to take oral evidence and spent several days doing that. A number of potential witnesses were prepared to give evidence only on condition that their statements would not be made public. Of course when we reported, it made it easy for others to say, "Where did they get that idea from?"
Some of the evidence that was given in confidence was important and without it we would have had a less complete picture, but it did make the review easier to criticise. Lesson three: if you have to drink from a poisoned chalice, better to do it in full public view if you can. We were told many diverse stories about some issues, both in relation to research and in relation to child abuse. They could not all be true but documentation did not exist to verify one consistent story. We had to conclude that the essential question raised by the minister had some validity—there did seem to be something the matter with the system. Accordingly we recommended that research governance needed a better system; that child protection needed clearer guidance about possible fabricated illness; that consent needed clearer guidance; and that there should be a way of reporting supposed adverse events from all treatments, not just drugs. We also concluded that parents really needed to know if CNEP in neonates did damage or not.
Short of a new randomised control trial it seemed that funding a longer term follow-up might give the answer. Marlow et al have now completed the review that we commissioned (Lancet 2006;367:1080, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)68475-4); it shows that CNEP was associated with no more damage than control treatments. Several months after we reported and ministers accepted all our recommendations, we were roundly attacked in the BMJ (BMJ 2000;321:715-6, doi:10.1136/bmj.321.7263.715). I can’t think of anything I have found more uncomfortable than that weekend. Worse still was having to speak on the Monday at a conference on a different subject, wondering just how many in the audience had read that week’s BMJ. Lesson four: when drinking from poisoned chalices, don’t expect the effects to wear off quickly. It is easy with hindsight to think of ways in which we could have been given different terms of reference, spent more money, done things differently. Commenting on the detail at this distance seems pointless but I do agree with those who say that a body is needed that can either investigate complaints about research or advise on the subject. Had such a body existed at that time, however, I still think it would have come to similar conclusions. We do need governance systems that protect patients and provide safe circumstances for research to prosper. Both are essential, but neither was guaranteed by the systems in place before we reported. No doubt the current system could be improved, but we do need a system or there will be more inquiries.
Finally, does drinking from the poisoned chalice do any good—is it good for the soul, the personal development and all that? Do you develop a thicker skin, making you tougher and more able to take poison in the future? I think not. I feel more vulnerable and easier to hurt as a result of the experience, though that may be a good thing. People who are in senior positions need thin skins, not thick ones. So lesson five for poisoned chalices is simple: when handed one, drink up and smile—it goes with the job.
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2347
Rapid Responses published: An appreciation of Professor Griffiths' identification of a poisoned chalice Iain Chalmers, Edmund Hey (31 October 2008) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An appreciation of Professor Griffiths' identification of a poisoned chalice 31 October 2008 Iain Chalmers, Editor, James Lind Library James Lind Initiative, OX2 7LG, Edmund Hey Send response to journal: Re: An appreciation of Professor Griffiths' identification of a poisoned chalice
We write to express our appreciation of, and thanks to, Professor Rod Griffiths for publishing (1, 2) his perspectives on the events triggered by allegations that the trial of Continuous Negative Extrathoracic Pressure (CNEP) undertaken in neonates in Stoke on Trent was so flawed that it amounted to serious professional misconduct.
Everything we have come to know about this saga has made it clear that many of the allegations of misconduct had little to do with the CNEP trial and a lot to do with a determined campaign to destroy doctors who had been involved in child protection work, particularly David Southall and Martin Samuels.
As Professor Griffiths reports, once Ministers had agreed that an enquiry into the CNEP trial should take place, campaigners came out of the woodwork and demanded that the terms of reference of the enquiry be extended to investigate the child protection work done by these two paediatricians – in Professor Griffiths’ apt language, to top up the poisoned chalice that he had been handed. We agree wholeheartedly with Professor Griffiths’ conclusion that “if you have to drink from a poison chalice, better to do it in full public view.” We can also agree with him that, had a body capable of investigating complaints about research in public been in existence eight years ago, it might well “have come to similar conclusions” to his panel about the need for a more effective system of research governance.
Given Professor Griffiths’ views now on the CNEP trial (2), we are confident that he agrees with us that a thorough, public investigation would have been highly unlikely to have found fault with the way the CNEP trial was conducted. However, as we have made clear in our commentary in the Lancet (3), allegations of forged consent forms made behind closed doors continue to hang over the heads of 34 doctors who were providing neonatal care in Stoke on Trent during the early 1990s. No evidence to support these allegations has yet been made public. If consent forms were forged that is a scandal; if they were not then the allegations were false and highly derogatory and damaging (4). Although we believe that the Department of Health is largely to blame for the failure to ensure natural, transparent justice in this affair, matters would not have got so completely out of hand after the Department’s report appeared had some of the paediatricians most critical of the clinicians in Stoke been required to defend their opinions in public then and there. This observation applies particularly to Professor Terry Stacey, one of the three members of Professor Griffiths’ enquiry team (who was appointed to direct the Central Office for Research Ethics Committees soon after this report was completed), and to Richard Nicholson, Editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, who has declared confidently that CNEP was used in research without parental consent (5). The clinicians in Stoke should be assumed to be innocent of this charge unless a proper investigation, conducted in public, reveals otherwise. Iain Chalmers and Edmund Hey References 1 Griffiths R. On drinking from a poisoned chalice. bmj.com, 1 April 2006. 2 Griffiths R. CNEP and research governance. Lancet 2006;367:1037–8. 3 Hey E, Chalmers I. Are any of the criticisms of the CNEP trial true? Lancet 2006;367:1032–3. 4 Hey E. The 1996 Continuous Negative Extrathoracic Pressure (CNEP) trial: were parents’ allegations of research fraud fraudulent? (in press) [Subsequently published in Pediatrics 2006;117;2244-2246] 5 Nicholson R. Editorial. Bulletin of Medical Ethics May 2003, p 1. Competing interests: None declared Editor’s note: This response was submitted in April 2006, but technical problems relating to the fact that the article which it was responding to had been posted as a webextra article meant that the response couldn't be displayed.
See editor's footnote to that article for further explanation - http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/oct31_2/a2347 This article has now been republished as a stand alone article, making it possible to post rapid responses to it.
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