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  No Justice For Accused Mothers ROSS COULTHART, REPORTER: It's one thing every parent dreads. To have to take a seriously ill child into hospital. To have to subject one you love to the invasive tests, investigations and procedures that have become so much a part of modern medical care. But what happens when a Doctor says an illness can't be explained by any organic cause? Today, you'll see how, increasingly, doctors are alleging the child's illness is in fact the consequence of deliberate abuse by a parent. It's a shocking allegation to make. Twelve years ago in the English town of Cleveland, 121 children were removed from the care of their parents on the basis of an unproven medical diagnosis a test which claimed to indicate a child had been sexually abused. A crucial finding in the subsequent public inquiry that ordered most of the children be returned to their families was that cases of child abuse should not be decided solely on the basis of a doctor's opinion. But that's exactly what many parents claim has happened to them here in Australia with allegations made by doctors that they're abusing their children by fabricating illnesses. Today, you'll meet some of the mothers we've met who say they were unfairly accused. JENNY: Well I am saying it's not true and I am saying it's not borne out by my son's medical files. REPORTER: It's impossible for us to ever say for certain if people did or didn't abuse their children by seeking them unnecessary medical treatment. But, as you'll see, in many cases we've reviewed in recent weeks, including one you'll see today, there are sound reasons to show that the judgment they put their kids at risk was made unfairly even more worrying, in another case, that the claim was made maliciously. CATHY KENDALL: He actually said to my GP 'How about we report her to the SCAN team and have her children taken off her. REPORTER: It got that serious? KENDALL: It did. REPORTER: A specialist threatens to accuse you of child abuse because you're complaining about your son's treatment? KENDALL: That's right. REPORTER: It's a vital part of the training given to aspiring doctors these days for them to be taught the warning signs of child abuse. Quite properly, medical professionals are on a hair-trigger: legally obliged to notify of child abuse on even the slightest suspicion. But apart from physical or sexual abuse, doctors are now taught about abuse where parents, normally mothers, fabricate their child's illness. Since the mid-1970s an increasingly controversial label has been used to describe cases ranging from where a child's disease is completely imagined to where an actual disease was deliberately induced. As SUNDAY told you back in July, this condition is labelled Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or MSBP. The British documentary we aired presented strong video evidence of mothers deliberately hurting their kids, faking symptoms of illness that unless it was caught on video would have convinced doctors the child was seriously ill. Mothers were caught on camera deliberately smothering their children. But here in Australia, as well as in Britain, there are many cases where the evidence against the mothers accused is not so strong - where doctoral researcher Helen Hayward-Brown says a real injustice has been done. HELEN HAYWARD-BROWN, DOCTORAL RESEARCHER: Well I am saying that parents are being wrongly, falsely, accused or some of the processes in a diagnosis of MSBP are problematic and difficult. Yes there are some guilty parents out there but this does not make it acceptable for so many parents to be falsely accused and have their lives completely destroyed. The innocent parents must be protected. TERRY DONALD, ADELAIDE WOMEN'S & CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL: It's never easy to prove any form of child abuse. But this is a particularly difficult form to prove, mainly because it depends on people, doctors, not being able to find a medical diagnosis that accounts for the child's symptoms or disease. REPORTER: Here in Australia, child protection experts such as Terry Donald and John Jeireidini confirm about one Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy case a year at Adelaide's Women and Children's Hospital. But even they question the broadness with which the label is being applied. REPORTER: Is there the risk with MSBP that it could become a diagnosis by default where doctors can't find an explanation for what is in fact a very rare or hard to detect illness. DONALD: Yes, and I think that in fact happens. REPORTER: And, by definition, the risk is it will happen most to the parents who are the most concerned with their child's welfare those who challenge doctors and specialists; those who demand second opinions and those who complain when they are still not satisfied. The most controversial aspect of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is the way many of its proponents rely on so-called profiles or indicators to help doctors initially 'detect' this disorder. The difficulty is that many of these 'indicators' could just as well describe an illness that's extremely hard to detect or rare or one that comes and goes. REPORTER: The literature warns doctors to be suspicious when they encounter things like: READ: "Persistent or recurrent illnesses for which a cause cannot be found; discrepancies between history and clinical findings; symptoms and signs that don't occur when a child is away from the mother; unusual symptoms that don't make clinical sense REPORTER: What's truly terrifying about this alleged disorder is how the ordinary acts of a parent's love become indicators that the parent is abusing her child. Evidence that would normally suggest a mother's innocence is actually being used in the scientific literature to suggest that they are guilty. In one paper, merely 'presenting at a hospital' is now an MSBP indicator. But 'not presenting' is also an indicator. In another: 'not being as concerned about the child's health as the doctor is' is an indicator while, you guessed it, so is 'cooperating with the doctors'. 'Confessing' helps. Another view: 'denying it'. 'Having medical knowledge' is a real warning sign for many. 'Appearing as the perfect parent, nurturing, loving and caring', fits the profile of the Munchausen mother. 'A poor intellectual relationship with the husband', or being 'lonely', is another dead giveaway. DONALD: Profiling I think is being used. Certainly it is being used as an argument by some people to support the suspicion they've got that a particular child's problem has been induced by the person who they demonstrate to have this profile. REPORTER: And is that unreasonable? DONALD: I think it's unreasonable. What we would do is go from the other end. We would look at the child, at the problem. Process the information from a historical and investigation point of view. Decide in the scheme of things and with the help of other specialists if this child's problem could be diagnosed. Are there investigations that haven't been done. REPORTER: If you accept what's said about her in the files of DOCS - NSW' Department of Community Services - this woman we'll call her Jenny is a child abuser. She's accused of behaviour that fits the classic Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy profile. This 1998 notification claims Jenny has continued to present her son to different doctors and specialists even though: READ: "she was told over the past couple of years that there is nothing wrong with him. REPORTER: No day passes without Jenny fearing Community Services will come to take her children away. JENNY: They've had 15 months to investigate me. They have just completely violated my every personal privacy, every human right that I have. They've had meetings with my school about me. They've faxed the community nurses. They've faxed just everywhere that they can have to try and defame me and in 15 months time they can't take me to court. REPORTER: Not only does Jenny adamantly deny she's done anything wrong, the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission and the Community Services Commission are now formally investigating her complaints about how and why she was ever notified in the first place. REPORTER: You're accused of abusing your child really aren't you? That's at the heart of it JENNY: Yes, that's correct. REPORTER: The notification came from Sydney Children's Hospital at Randwick. For five years her son was treated here for severe stomach and bowel problems, undergoing numerous tests and referrals. They took his illness so seriously he was fed through tubes through his nose, then his stomach wall. He even underwent major surgery. All apparently unnecessary: READ: "[He] had surgery in the past before the Child Protection team recognised the problem as being Munchausen by Proxy REPORTER: But what's extraordinary about Jenny's case is the amount of evidence she has obtained to show how much of what is claimed about her son's treatment in the hospital's notification and DOCS own files is either misleading or just plain wrong. JENNY: What they're saying, is that basically all the surgery, all the tests, all the medications, everything was done because we asked for it. REPORTER: Now, is that borne out by the files? JENNY: No, it's not. REPORTER: For starters, if anything, the evidence from the hospital's own notes shows that, contrary to what DOCS has been told since the notification, the hospital clearly believed Jenny's son did suffer from an illness dumping syndrome and bowel problems - in the two years prior to the notification. And right through the five years at Randwick, Jenny repeatedly questioned the need for further invasive treatments. When specialists told her in 1994 they needed to operate on her son, the hospital's own files record Jenny in fact had to be persuaded to let the operation go ahead. JENNY: Even in the notes, it's got 'Parents having second thoughts about surgery. Parents extremely anxious about whether to go ahead with the surgery. REPORTER: Which hardly meets the profile of someone determined to get unnecessary medical treatments? JENNY: Yeah. REPORTER: And was that ever reported to the Department of Community Services? JENNY: No. Absolutely everything in my son's medical file that disagreed with the diagnosis of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, that disagreed with the profile of the mother eager for surgery, the mother eager for tests, all, anything that supported that in the file was withheld. REPORTER: And at a time when the Hospital claims it was telling Jenny there was nothing wrong with her son, one of its specialist doctors confirmed her son's diagnosis to allow him the granting of a Starlight Foundation wish for seriously ill kids a trip to the Barrier Reef. Her son had wanted to go to Disneyland but the Hospital actually said her son was too sick to go overseas. JENNY: In the letter to Department of Community Services or the notification, it actually states that doctors had been telling me for years that there was nothing the matter. REPORTER: On one occasion when Jenny wasn't even present for several days, a doctor minding her son witnessed him so ill that he collapsed into unconsciousness the doctor provided this statement to Jenny to help her in her battle to clear her name: READ: "I can do nothing but praise Jenny as a mother Jenny has often talked to me about wanting to reduce [her son's] medication or change his management if something was not working, but she has always diligently done what the doctors have told her to do. REPORTER: What concerns Jenny is that, as the files show, the doctor who notified her to DOCS only did so four months after her son had left the hospital and then only after she complained about her son's treatment. It's the circumstances of this notification that are now under investigation by NSW' Health Care Complaints Commission. REPORTER: Why do you believe the notification was made? JENNY: I believe it was made for two reasons. It was made to intimidate me. It was also made to discredit me in front of the Health Care Complaints Commission. REPORTER: What the Hospital's files show and witnesses we have spoken to confirm is that Jenny was not happy with the invasive treatments her son was receiving. She asked for a second opinion. And it was her new specialist who now claimed the previous treatments given by the Hospital over half a decade were in fact all unnecessary. REPORTER: How do you know you're not sick? JENNY: I guess the main thing is if I was guilty of what they said, how come they've had to provide such false, misleading and inaccurate information to the Department of Community Services. DR ANGELO MAZZEFERRO, JENNY'S GP: We were never notified either by the Hospital or by DOCS that such a diagnosis had been made. REPORTER: What is especially odd about the Hospital's notification is that even after it alerted its concerns of a child at risk to DOCS, neither of the two family doctors who treat Jenny's two children were alerted to this supposed threat to their safety. REPORTER: Does that surprise you that you weren't notified? DR MAZZEFERRO: Well yes it greatly surprises me and in fact it concerns me that that happened because as the primary care physicians, I think we should be one of the first people to be notified. REPORTER: Do you think she is a case of MSBP? DR MAZZEFERRO: No, I don't and nor do the other doctors in this practice. We have never in the time that we have known the family and it's been a number of years that we've been the treating physicians, at no stage have we ever noted anything to suggest that she had MSBP. REPORTER: Both of Jenny's family doctors were excluded from the care and protection meetings held by the Hospital at the request of DOCS. It was those meetings that decided Jenny was fabricating her son's illness. The family GPs were pejoratively dismissed as sympathizers in the DOCS' files. For contrary to the Hospital's assertions to DOCS that there is nothing wrong with her child, Dr Mazzeferro and his colleague both witnessed his chronic illness. DR MAZZEFERRO: if you read the correspondence that we have had from the hospital, I note that there have been cases where the problem has been noted with the child while he was in hospital. REPORTER: As a real organic condition? DR MAZZEFERRO: As a real organic condition. And ah the problem hasn't only occurred in hospital. It's occurred at pre-school, it's occurred at school, where independent people have been around and mother hasn't been around at the time. REPORTER: Mazzeferro's colleague, Dr Frank Vozzo, also takes issue with claims by the Hospital that specialists have told Jenny that there is nothing with her son. READ LETTER: I personally have not been advised 'that there is nothing wrong with [him] by his treating specialists. REPORTER: Jenny finally changed hospitals, taking her son to the New Children's Hospital here at Westmead where her son's illness was subsequently confirmed, and successfully treated by changing his diet. Now remember, her old Hospital had assured DOCS it'd been telling her for two years there was nothing wrong with her son. Yet, bizarrely, just a week after she left Randwick last year, one of the specialists there actually certified her son's illness as genuine so Jenny could claim a Child disability Allowance. REPORTER: The Hospital's notification to DOCS also made damning allegations about Jenny, inferring she fits the profile of a Munchausen herself because mother has been presenting herself to doctors unnecessarily. But her own specialist doctors dispute that claim. In its pursuit of Jenny, one of her son's specialists had rung her immunologist: JENNY: He actually phoned my immunologist, asked him, said to him actually that he thought I was abusing my child. Said that did I have a known illness. Was I making up symptoms and was I a Munchausen Syndrome adult. REPORTER: Hospital files are legal documents, so medical staff are meant to date and sign any notes they make in them. Odd then that in Jenny's son's file, an anonymous author writes of Jenny's claimed illnesses Mother doesn't have these. That file is information DOCS is relying on to justify its belief her child is at risk. It's concerning then that the Hospital's notification does not acknowledge that Jenny's immunologist has now in fact confirmed in writing what he told the Hospital: that he did not think she was faking her illness. READ: Dear Jenny,... 1. No, I do not think you've been making up symptoms AND 2. I am happy to continue to be your doctor. REPORTER: If the Hospital genuinely believes Jenny is fabricating her son's illness then at the very least it has irresponsibly done a great deal to encourage her to believe her child does in fact have something wrong with him. The NSW Department of Community Services also has a great deal of explaining to do. If it genuinely thinks Jenny's child is at risk then why has it never met Jenny or her son? And why were Jenny and her son and the current treating doctors excluded from Child protection meetings?. And how did a consultant to the Department confirm the Hospital's claim that Jenny's son was at risk when he never even met Jenny or her son and before he'd seen all the evidence? REPORTER: Let's talk about Dr Ryan. Have you ever met Doctor Ryan? JENNY: No. REPORTER: Has your son ever met Dr Ryan? JENNY: No. REPORTER: Has anybody in your family ever met Dr Ryan? JENNY: No. REPORTER: And yet he wrote a report, asserting that you are a child abuser, didn't he? JENNY: That's correct. REPORTER: Do you find that unusual? JENNY:I find it bizarre and worrying. I mean how could he base that, never met me, and never having seen my son's full medical files? REPORTER: Dr Michael Ryan is a staff specialist at the Child Protection Unit at Westmead New Children's Hospital. In Jenny's case, he did an assessment for DOCS confirming that her son was at risk from MSBP. But no matter how properly Dr Ryan investigates, his assessment is only ever going to be as good as the information he's given. This letter from the new paediatrician treating Jenny's son confirms he was not spoken to by Dr Ryan in the preparation of his confirmatory report. Nor was the family doctor. REPORTER: If there had been a full investigation into the question as to whether or not she did suffer from this syndrome, do you think that natural justice, fairness, common sense would demand that you and your colleagues had been consulted? DR MAZZEFERRO: Well I repeat. I think we should have been one of the first to be consulted and asked whether we had seen any evidence of this. REPORTER: As you'll see next, some doctors don't like being proved wrong. So much so that one mother who complained almost lost her kids because of a malicious allegation of child abuse. KENDALL: I was only out to get my son the best possible medical care that he could possibly get. But, in doing that, I have absolutely proved them wrong. 100% wrong. MSBP - PART TWO REPORTER: Cathy Kendall has spent most of her adult life helping other people get a fair go from the health system. In her work as a health consumer advocate, she's been a vigilant critic of medical negligence. Her work on various medical disciplinary boards has given her an insight into how the professions sometimes protect their own. But nothing prepared her for what happened when her son Ben badly damaged his hip in a horse-riding accident two-and-a-half years ago. Specialists at a major public hospital told her Ben's hip was healing. But as months went by without improvement, Cathy took a series of Ben's x-rays into a specialist doctor at the hospital. KENDALL: They told that I was really worried for nothing. They did examine my son and they looked at one single plain x-ray. The last one that I had done. They wouldn't look at the others in a series. REPORTER: Whereas, if you did look at the x-rays in a series, what did it show? KENDALL: Well if they had properly looked at all of the x-rays and M.R.I.s they would have been able to see that my son was at an initial stage of a collapse and that he wasn't healing and they would have been able to understand that by the information on the x-rays. REPORTER: These letters show that within a few weeks, two Melbourne specialists had confirmed Cathy's fears. READ: The advice you obtained initially that Ben's disease had healed was, of course, not correct. REPORTER: Now Mrs Kendall would be the first to admit she was very anxious about the deterioration in her son's hip. Not least because a radiologist's report confirmed her fears that it was getting worse not better. But the Queensland specialist doctor didn't even want to know about it. KENDALL: Well they wouldn't actually read the radiology report because the doctor said that radiologists don't know how to read x-rays. REPORTER: What, they point-blank refused to read it? KENDALL: Yes, he said he wasn't interested in the report. That he would read the x-ray himself, the final x-ray that I'd had a couple of days before I saw him. And he said Mrs Kendall, your son is healing, he's going to be fine. He's doing very well. He's revascularising and you don't need to be concerned. REPORTER: As any patient is entitled to do, Mrs Kendall pushed the matter, insisting the doctor actually look at the evidence. It was then that things got ugly. KENDALL: He said 'Mrs Kendall, I think you're being over-anxious.' He said 'Would you like me to hurt your son. You let me operate on your son and I'll hurt him. I'll show you how much I can hurt him.' REPORTER: The doctor said this to you? KENDALL: Yes, he did in front of my two children and my husband. REPORTER: What did you say? KENDALL: I asked him to stop saying that in front of my kids. He then said to me 'Well, I think your kids should leave the office. I'd like to speak to you and your husband alone. So when my kids left the office, he said 'Do you people know anything about child abuse.' And my husband said 'What are you getting at?' And he said 'Well, I think you're guilty of child abuse to keep your son on crutches when he's healing and there's no need for him to be leaning on crutches.' REPORTER: So strong is the fear inside our public hospital system of being taken for a ride by a malingering patient or parent, there's even a term for it: Malingeraphobia. And in Cathy's case, that's clearly what the doctors believed. Every doctor she approached in Queensland already knew on the grapevine she was that neurotic mother. When she sought a second opinion, that doctor also refused to look at the x-rays, writing this report saying Ben was healing. And when she went to another specialist well he told her she had to make her peace with God! KENDALL: He said 'Mrs Kendall, I am the only Christian Doctor in Qld' He said 'I am the only doctor that you will be able to trust' and then he proceeded to name several other specialists in his field and he said 'They're not Christian doctors, you won't be able to trust them' And he said 'I think your son is fine'. He said 'But you, Mrs Kendall, I think have a serious problem with God.' REPORTER: Cathy's son in fact had a severe condition called avascular necrosis. His hip bone was slowly dying. As she'd feared, it wasn't healing at all. A diagnosis she confirmed with two leading Melbourne specialists within days. To her horror one of the Victorian doctors told her it was possibly too late to try and save Ben's hip by operating. It was so bad it had READ: ... a poor prognosis in the best of hands. REPORTER: The other specialist recommended urgent surgery. Cathy was faced with the awful prospect of maybe having to fuse her son's hip. KENDALL: One of the doctors was saying 'Look, Mrs Kendall, there's no more time. You've now reached the end of our ability to help your son. There's too much damage done and your son needs a hip fusion'. [CUT to 3026] REPORTER: How many days after the Qld doctors had refused to treat your son did the Melbourne doctors tell this to you? KENDALL: The Melbourne doctors were telling me at the same time the other doctors in Qld were saying 'No, nothing's wrong'. REPORTER: Cathy Kendall had the resources to go further afield for advice. With the allegations of child abuse from the Queensland specialist still ringing in her ears, she wanted to be sure she could never be accused of fabricating Ben's illness. So she took her son to the United States to consult five of the World's top experts on this sort of injury. KENDALL: Three of the five doctors at that stage said there's no time left, an operation at this stage is, would not offer your son a benefit because too much damage has been done. At that stage the head of the femur was actually out of the joint, out of the socket. REPORTER: As if having to deal with her son's serious illness wasn't enough, Cathy Kendall now had to deal with the ire of the Queensland specialist doctors whom she now angrily accused of negligence. But rather than accept he'd made a mistake, one specialist wanted to deprive Cathy of the one thing she cared about most, her children. KENDALL: One of the specialist physicians rang my GP and was pretty outraged because I had spoken out, and said to my GP that any mother who would travel across the World in search of an operation for her son must have something wrong with her. How about we report her to the SCAN team? REPORTER: SCAN's the 'Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect' team? KENDALL: Yes, that stands for suspected child abuse and neglect. And he actually said to my GP, how about we report her to the SCAN team and have her children taken off her REPORTER: Cathy's GP has confirmed to SUNDAY that the threat was made. Not surprisingly he didn't take up the offer. Helen Hayward-Brown says such accounts are only the tip of an iceberg. While researching the problems of families with chronically-ill children for her doctorate, she's investigated many cases where mothers have been unfairly accused of abusing their kids by fabricating illnesses. HAYWARD-BROWN: Some parents believe that they have been notified against in relation to MSBP simply because they have made complaints, whether those complaints are written or verbal. Or they have questioned the doctors too closely about the medical management of their child. REPORTER: One common feature in many of these cases is the use of so-called experts to confirm an assessment of Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy who have never even met the mother or her child. HAYWARD-BROWN: Very often they just go through the medical file. They go through medical summaries or the medical file. Often they don't even meet the child. In many cases, in some of the cases that I have seen, the medical summaries have been inaccurate. And in fact that's a point I would like to make: that the parents I have interviewed their stories have always stood up to my checks, they have never ever faltered or made mistakes or rarely made mistakes with their stories whereas with the medical documentation it often does not stand up to scrutiny. REPORTER: Would you ever make a confirming diagnosis of MSBP based solely on the patient's notes? DONALD: Um, no. Because there'd always be questions that I would want to ask the parent, the referring doctor, other doctors. There would never be in the set of notes from my point of view all the information I want. REPORTER: But of course that's exactly what's happening...not only in Jenny's case, but also with other families we've met. In at least one other case we've reviewed, the same Dr Ryan who assessed Jenny as MSBP, did another assessment confirming another mother as a Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy case again without meeting her or her child. That mother is also complaining to the Health Care Complaints Commission that she was unfairly accused. The fear is that MSBP is fast becoming a diagnosis by default for intractable hard-to-fix patients. REPORTER: How many cases do you know of where you would dispute the diagnosis that's been made that a particular family has got an MSBP case? HAYWARD-BROWN: Well in the personal interviews I have had with parents I would dispute approximately 14 of the cases that I have had to do with. REPORTER: When Lachlan Molesworth took these faltering steps for our camera, his father, Melbourne barrister Simon Molesworth, was flushed with pride. They're the most steps Lachlan's been able to take for years. Lachlan is fighting Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but the battle to convince the medical system he does actually suffer from a real illness has taught Dad how easily the suspicion of a fabricated illness can be raised. SIMON MOLESWORTH, QC: Once a suspicion enters the medical record, gets on the file of the patient then it then has a life of its own. that question then has a life and it continues on from practitioner to practitioner. REPORTER: Simon and his wife are both confident Lachlan is genuinely ill. But, while the family has never had to endure the direct accusation Lachlan's illness is a case of MSBP, some doctors treating their son have demanded persistent investigations into whether it's all in Lachlan's head or whether his malaise is being encouraged by his mother in particular. As a QC, used to seeing how evidence is tested in the courts, Mr Molesworth has no problems with the question being asked. But he believes some in the medical profession are investigating difficult illnesses like CFS with an inherent bias a belief that the patients are faking it. MOLESWORTH: Professional competence requires an impartiality being applied to the task of inquiry and if in fact one starts out with a biased question or biased survey you necessarily get a slanted outcome which tends to support the presumption that is in the mind of the inquirer. REPORTER: What infuriates Simon is research questionnaires like this one sent out to CFS sufferers in June. It asks patients to: READ: "...describe qualities most like your MOTHER.Ã'ƒÂ¢Ã'¢â€šÂ¬Ã'‚ "Tries to control everything I do...Tends to baby me...Tries to make me dependent on her...is over-protective of me.Ã'ƒÂ¢Ã'¢â€šÂ¬Ã'‚ MOLESWORTH: Now why that questionnaire should focus on just the mother and not the father is a serious question to ask because it indicates that there's an underlying presumption that this is a problem associated with mothers and their children as distinct from an illness which might not be related at all to relationship problems. Or if it is an illness which has associated relationship problems, with it that it is one that involves both parents. REPORTER: Since Simon Molesworth first started speaking out about the medical profession's lack of investigative rigour on CFS cases, he's been flooded with letters from across Australia many parents complaining they've been accused unfairly of abusing their kids by claiming they have the disease. MOLESWORTH: An over-concerned parent. A parent that wishes to investigate the illness independently from a medical practitioner is often viewed with suspicion as being driven by other reasons to keep this going. REPORTER: Now do you think that's unfair? MOLESWORTH: I think it's very unfair in many instances. Look I am not going to deny that there won't be occasions where there might be a Munchausen by Proxy example in the community. But what I do say is that the process by which assessments are carried out to determine whether or not a parent falls within the category of a Munchausen parent is not one which lends itself to what I would call an appropriate application of natural justice REPORTER: Nothing should ever deter our doctors from being able to notify a genuine concern about a child at risk to the authorities that we entrust to protect them. But there is a growing number of cases suggesting that once that suspicion is raised inside the child protection system there is neither the resources nor the checks and balances to fairly investigate them. ENDS. Click here for a printer-friendly version. |
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