GMC suspends former Alder Hey pathologist

Professor Dick van Velzen, the pathologist at the centre of the Alder Hey inquiry into the retention of organs, has been suspended by the General Medical Council.

Using new disciplinary powers to impose an interim 18 month suspension, the council will now decide whether the charges of systematically, illegally, and unethically stripping the organs from the bodies of thousands of children warrant Professor van Velzen's permanent removal from the medical register. The suspension will be reviewed after six months.

Professor van Velzen, who was not present or represented at the GMC hearing, later told the BBC that he had never taken organs without permission. “If people forgot to tell parents what a postmortem is then that is terrible, but it is not my fault,” he said.

He claimed that in removing every organ from every case he was simply following international guidelines and blamed the Alder Hey management for a lack of support and resources. “The main apology I can offer parents is that I had not resigned on their behalf earlier,” he said.

Elsewhere the reaction of the medical establishment to the Alder Hey report has been a combination of condemnation of the practices exposed and an eagerness to regain public confidence.

The BMA gave its support to the report's recommendation that the Human Tissue Act 1961 should be amended to ensure that parents give informed consent before organs are retained. Its chairman, Dr Ian Bogle, was eager to defend the reputation of Alder Hey as “an excellent hospital” providing “high quality care for children.”

“I hope we can now start to look to the future and a rebuilding of trust between a good hospital and its community,” he said.

The NHS Confederation claimed that the introduction of clinical governance made it unlikely that the events of Alder Hey could ever take place again. “However, for [clinical governance] to work properly it requires mature, trusting relationships between doctors and NHS management,” said the confederation's chief executive, Stephen Thornton. “I am urging government to make this a high priority for the work of the new NHS Leadership Centre.”

Meanwhile the Pathological Society sought to distance the practice of the “overwhelming majority of pathologists” from those exposed in the Alder Hey inquiry. “Pathologists generally are scrupulous about ensuring that full permission for autopsy is given and that the permission form mentions that tissue may be retained,” said the society's president, Professor Nick Wright. (See pp 309, 371.)

Mortality from colorectal cancer declining in Scotland

Age standardised mortality from colorectal cancer is declining in Scotland, despite an increase in the incidence, the latest Clinical Outcomes Indicators report from Scotland shows. The increases in survival may reflect, at least in part, improvements in perioperative care, the report says.

International comparisons of survival for colorectal cancer in the report showed that Scotland was in an intermediate group (along with England, Wales, and Denmark), enjoying higher survival than eastern European countries but consistently lower survival than other western European countries. The magnitude of the differences between survival in Scotland and, for example, Switzerland are very large.

The lower survival rates in Scotland have been attributed to several factors, such as the differences in per capita spending on health services compared with other countries in western Europe and in the stage of disease at diagnosis.

To improve early detection, pilot studies of screening for the disease are being carried out in Grampian, Tayside, and Fife.

More details about the Clinical Outcome Working Group can be found at www.show.scot.nhs.uk/crag