Published 21 April 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1657
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1657

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Three elderly patients died from inappropriate drugs, inquest finds

Clare Dyer

1 BMJ

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

Three elderly patients who died at a hospital in Hampshire in the late 1990s were given inappropriate drugs for their condition which hastened their death, an inquest jury has concluded.

Another two patients were found by the jury to have been given the correct drugs but in doses that contributed to their deaths. The deaths of a further five patients were not caused by the drugs they were taking, the jury decided.

The findings at Portsmouth Coroners’ Court follow an unprecedented inquest ordered by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, into the deaths of 10 patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital between 1996 and 1999.

Mr Straw’s permission was required because seven of the 10 bodies had been cremated. The inquest comes at the end of a decade of inquiries by police and the NHS into 92 deaths at the hospital, where families claimed that relatives who were sent for recuperation . . . [Full text of this article]


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