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Commentary

Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, Richmond House, 79 Whitehall, London SW1A 2NS, UK; liam.donaldson@doh.gsi.gov.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

When the guilty verdicts were brought in on the murder of 15 of Harold Shipman’s patients in the winter of 2000,¹ I was asked by the then Secretary of State for Health whether there was any way in which we could establish whether there had been other clinically suspicious deaths. It was on this basis that I commissioned a clinical audit of Shipman’s practice from Professor Richard Baker. The question by the Secretary of State for Health to me as Chief Medical Officer and my decision to establish the clinical investigation were quite unprecedented.

The fact that the subsequent report of the clinical audit² judged it likely that Shipman had murdered more than 200 of his patients was shocking. The subsequent analysis of deaths by the rigorous legal processes of the judicial inquiry³ arrived at broadly similar numbers. Baker’s medical detective work was ground breaking and has set a gold . . . [Full text of this article]