When is a scandal not a scandal? Yet another inquisition into an alleged witch hunt by baby doctors with murder on their minds has failed to deliver baddies.
Earlier this month Mr Justice Collins reversed the General Medical Council's (GMC) decision to strike Professor Sir Roy Meadow off the medical register. He also criticised the GMC for going after the professor, who was struck off following criticism of his evidence to the trial of Sally Clark, the solicitor who was convicted of killing her two baby boys and later freed on appeal. Mr Justice Collins confirmed that expert witnesses should not be subject to court action or professional punishment for making a mistake in good faith, and he clarified the duty and discipline expected of expert witnesses.
However, his criticism of the GMC went largely unnoticed. Instead the national media response polarised paediatricians and parents: SirRoy, suave, towering and now fallen, versus parents, innocent, harmless, grieving.
But was that the real story? We should be asking, what are the GMC and the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE) up to?
A generation of pioneering British paediatricians has been arraigned before the GMC. Child protection paediatrics is in crisis.
In the same week as the Meadow judgement, the Attorney General announced that an inquiry into 89 cases involving Shaken Baby Syndrome had confirmed the efficacy of the established medical evidence, with only three convictions recommended for appeal.
Paediatricians are hoping that these events will calm the tide of virulence which is overwhelming the child protection professions.
Professor Meadow has a reputation for being arrogant. His interpretation of statistics in his evidence to the trial of Sally Clark was enough to make the GMC decide to strike him off last year.
But was this savage punishment for a different crime: revealing to a reluctant profession and public that some mothers might kill their children?
The Clark case also brought another pioneering paediatrician before the GMC. Professor David Southall had intervened after watching Sally Clark's husband describe how their baby was bleeding from the nose while in his father's care. The account so alarmed Professor Southall that he shared his suspicions with child protection police. His experience led him to suspect that the father, not the mother, may have attempted to suffocate the baby.
Mr Clark complained to the GMC.
The Law Lords, reviewing the role of medical experts in child protection cases in April 2005, insisted that it is the duty of child protection doctors 'to act single-mindedly in the interests of the child'. Lord Nicholls added that doctors should be able to act without the worry that if professional concerns about abuse proved unfounded, they might 'be exposed to claims by a distressed parent': paediatricians' patients were children, not parents.
This did not appear to be the GMC!s position. It says that it exists to protect the interests of patients and public. I have asked the GMC and the CHRE - in vain - how they square paediatricians' duty towards their child patients with the GMC and CHRE endorsements of complaints not by children, but accused adults.
The GMC is also untroubled by its own use of experts. Its case against David Southall relied on eminent paediatrician Tim David, who was also Mr Clark's expert witness. The GMC did not regard this as a conflict of interest.
It emerged during the GMC hearing that Professor Southall's concerns were due to be conveyed to the family court, dealing with the Clarks' third child. But the transcripts of the hearing reveal that an informal approach, counter to the usual guidelines on expert witnesses, was adopted. Court permission for Professor Southall to see the relevant papers in the case was not sought.
All of this prompted a panel member to ask whether Professor Southall had been put at a disadvantage. This did not stir the GMC. It found him guilty and suspended him from child protection work.
Professor Southall became well known to the public for video evidence that for the first time showed adults caught in the act of attempting to suffocate their babies. A ferocious campaign by parents' groups and their advocates finally rendered the covert video surveillance impossible.
But he first became celebrated for his radical reform of the treatment of premature babies. His research revealed how little attention was paid to the pain they suffered. He had set about finding ways to reduce their suffering, and introduced a less invasive ventilator (known as CNEP).
The CNEP programme was halted when a mother, Deborah Henshall, complained to the hospital trust that it had led to death or disability in two of her babies. Furthermore, she said, she had not consented to CNEP.
When the CNEP complaint converged with the movement to stop Professor Southall's work on suffocation, his career was in crisis.
Penny Mellor, a tenacious campaigner - she has been imprisoned for conspiracy to abduct a child for whom health and social services professionals were worried about fabricated illness - made a bizarre allegation to the hospital trust: Professor Southall was trafficking in children, and experimenting on babies, she said.
The trust launched an inquiry into Mellor's allegations. It decided they were groundless. It cost 1m.
The Government launched an inquiry led by Professor Rod Griffiths into Deborah Henshall's complaint. This inquiry found that death and disability had not been caused by CNEP, although Griffiths was critical of the management of the research, particularly the issue of consent - he had not found the consent forms.
But a subsequent Medical Defence Union inquiry by Sir Iain Chalmers, an expert on the conduct of research, and Dr Edmund Hey concluded that the CNEP research was well-conducted and useful, and there was no difficulty finding the consent forms - including the signature of the parent who had made the consent complaint, Deborah Henshall. She replied that it must have been forged. The police found no evidence to support her.
The stench of scandal is now billowing around the Government's reaction to the campaigns against Professor Southall and other paediatricians. Two years ago the Attorney General ordered a review of cases of unexplained child deaths over the past ten years. Numbers giving cause for concern were in single figures. The then children's minister, Margaret Hodge, ordered a review of 30,000 family court cases. The campaigners against Professor Southall proclaimed that 5,000 care orders would be overturned. But after the first tranche of 5,000 cases was examined, only one care plan was changed.
One positive outcome is clarification of the role of experts. But the Government has not acknowledged its own role in the child protection crisis. Sir Iain Chalmers, in a response to a national health research consultation published on the DoH website, criticised the Government for the way it had handled the CNEP crisis, saying this had damaged health research.
Rod Griffiths acknowledged to Nursery World that in the CNEP inquiry he was 'under pressure from lots of directions, especially from certain parents'
groups'. To do what? 'To blame somebody,' he replied.
CNEP has been vindicated. Professor Neal Marlow at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre followed up 65 pairs of babies on CNEP and the traditional ventilator. He found that CNEP did not cause death and disability, and 'in fact, some children may have done better with CNEP than they would have done with more conventional treatment'. This research has remained unpublished for 18 months.
After the GMC punished Professor Southall by banning him from child protection work, the CHRE didn't think the GMC had gone far enough, and turned to the appeal court to get him struck off. In a Kafkaesque argument, it claimed it was the professor's eminence that made him dangerous. The appeal court did not agree.
It seems as if scandals that exposed the GMC's slack regulation - like the Dr Harold Shipman murder case - have encouraged the regulators to show off their regulatory zeal, at the expense of child protection and pioneering paediatricians.
Meanwhile, research that improved premature babies' chances has been destroyed, careers have been ruined, controversies have been inflamed.
The Government panicked, and the GMC and the CHRE hurled themselves into inquisitions prompted by accused adults' movements. It is as if adults, not children, are the padiatricians' patients; as if adults, not children, constitute the public interest.
