UK panel finds lives shortened by hospital’s opioid use
LONDON — As many as 650 people had their lives shortened by a British hospital’s institutionalized practice of administering opioids without medical justification between 1989 and 2000, an independent panel concluded Wednesday after years of pressure from family members who demanded answers about the deaths of their loved ones.
A three-year investigation that examined more than 140,000 records found that 456 lives were shortened by the practice at Gosport War Memorial Hospital in southern England. At least 200 more people were “probably” similarly affected.
“There was a disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients by prescribing and administering ‘dangerous doses’ of a hazardous combination of medication not clinically indicated or justified,” Bishop James Jones, the panel’s chairman, said in the report.
Records show that “whereas a large number of patients and their relatives understood that their admission to the hospital was for either rehabilitation or respite care, they were, in effect, put on a terminal care pathway.”