Britain’s most prolific serial killer was a General Practitioner (GP), Dr. Harold Shipman. He wasn’t England’s most famous murderer. That accolade goes to Jack the Ripper. The Ripper killed five women in the streets of Whitechapel. Shipman might have been responsible for over 200 deaths.
Shipman’s legacy to the medical profession was not just a permanent simmering of mistrust. He triggered the introduction of revalidation, Britain’s version of maintenance of certification (MOC).
During Shipman’s prosecution the media scrutiny on physicians was intense. It’s both a beauty of and curse on our profession that we’re assumed to have such high code of ethics yet not spared the foibles of human nature.
“Homo homini lupus” doesn’t spare physicians. Bashar al-Assad was an ophthalmologist. Ayman al-Zawahiri once had taken the Hippocratic Oath.
This means that outliers, inevitable products of a Gaussian distribution, also get past the gates of medical school.
The government set up an inquiry headed by Dame Janet Smith. How could Shipman have gotten away with murder for so long? What were the systemic failures?
The Shipman Inquiry is 5000 pages long, compiled after interviewing 2500 witnesses. It cost the tax payer nearly 21 million pounds. Its conclusion was stunningly bland even if of military precision: doctors need more policing. This is like concluding that the First World War happened because people aren’t always nice to one another; a truism so uniformly true that it ceases to inform policy.
The report called for the General Medical Council (GMC), the prime regulatory agency for physicians, to work for patients, not physicians.
The solution: Revalidation.
