The treatment of the parents of the little boy with the brain tumour because they lost confidence in the ability of the paediatric department of this hospital to improve his deteriorating condition, is preposterous. The alarmist declarations that the feeding system was about to run out of battery life turns out to be nonsense and the clamour that the parents were dangerous nutters who were hazarding the life of their child was both untrue and and without any evidence to support it.
Now the parents are in custody in Spain and the child has been separated from them and is in a strange hospital on his own. Anyone who has the faintest grasp of the importance of parents to their desperately sick children will know that this is a cruel outcome of a grossly mishandled case by a hospital which thinks itself to be a good deal better than it is. This is not the first time this hospital has been associated with this kind of behaviour. We know of one case where it was instrumental in parents being threatened with a police protection order if they did not agree to a change of treatment insisted on by the hospital’s paediatricians. The parent backed down. The treatment was applied. The child died.
There are a lot of questions this hospital needs to answer about its methodology and its relationships with parents. Soon some very senior people will start to ask them.