Deadly ‘Dr Opiate’ retired on bumper NHS pension which funds second home in Spain and regular trips to Australia
Dr Jane Barton is at the heart of a scandal which saw 656 patients needlessly having their lives shortened at Gosport War Memorial Hospital
A DEADLY doctor whose blunders saw her dubbed "Dr Opiate" retired on a bumper NHS pension which funded a holiday home in Spain.
Dr Jane Barton is at the heart of a scandal which saw 656 patients needlessly having their lives shortened at Gosport War Memorial Hospital in Hampshire.
But while devastated families campaigned for justice during a 20 year cover up she retired to her £700,000 home with her Royal Navy commodore husband.
As the tragic failings at Gosport were finally brought to light yesterday, Barton was sunning herself in the Mediterranean.
A neighbour told reporters: "She's gone to Menorca."
While another said: “She doesn't have many friends around here.
"I only know her from seeing her across the street but she's friendly.
"Both their cars have gone, so I presume they're not there. I think they will have gone away."
When she isn’t visiting her holiday home in Spain, Barton is known to enjoy trips to Australia
While Down Under she goes on birdwatching trips with her husband Tim and even wrote about them for the Royal Naval Birdwatching Society journal, the reports.
But as Barton enjoys the comfortable trappings of life as a upper-middle class retiree, she is accused of leaving a trail of destruction behind.
She is alleged to have prescribed deadly doses of medical heroin diamorphine to patients at Gosport.
Diamorphine was the painkiller used by Harold Shipman to murder his estimated 260 victims.
There were so many deaths on her watch that the two wards she ran became known as "the end of the line".
She was found guilty of failings in her care of 12 patients at the hospital between 1996 and 1999.
But she wasn't sacked over her conduct and instead retired from medicine after the findings.
Barton was found to be responsible for 12 deaths of “multiple instances of serious professional misconduct” by the General Medical Council in 2010.
The GMC had been told of her “brusque and indifferent” manner, "intransigence and worrying lack of insight" and "failure to recognise the limits of her professional competence".
Barton is currently the only medical professional to face disciplinary action – and public condemnation for the blunders at Gosport – but the findings of the Gosport report prove she won't be the last.
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The Gosport Independent Panel investigation, first launched in 2014, examined more than one million documents.
It found hospital management, Hampshire Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, General Medical Council, and Nursing and Midwifery Council "all failed to act in ways that would have better protected patients and relatives".
The report also highlighted failings by healthcare organisations, local politicians and the coronial system.
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