Imagine the scene. You are a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps. You have been posted at short notice to Basra, and you are working alone, in temperatures around 40C in a hostile active service environment, with no readily available advice or supervision from more senior army medics. Your requests for training for your new role were refused, because the remainder of the detachment (from a regiment you had never worked with before) had already received theirs before you were suddenly drafted in.
This was the situation that faced Derek Keilloh on 15 September 2003, at the height of the Second Gulf War. He was a young doctor who had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as a medical student, and was still 6 months short of completing his training as an army GP – in the UK, he would not have been working unsupervised. When he arrived, he found that, in addition to the troops in his unit, the base housed a detention centre. He was given no clear instructions concerning his role and responsibility, if any, in relation to detainees, or how to deal with them.
This latter omission became relevant on that September evening, when Dr Keilloh was called urgently to see a prisoner who had collapsed. There was no electricity in the stifling detention block, and he had to examine the patient, Mr Baha Mousa, by moonlight. Realizing that he had suffered a cardiac arrest, Dr Keilloh commenced resuscitation procedures, then moved him to the adjacent medical centre, where there was at least some illumination from a single flickering fluorescent tube. Resuscitation attempts by Dr Keilloh and his hastily-assembled team continued for some time, but were ultimately unsuccessful.
Like all doctors following a failed resuscitation attempt, I’m sure he went over the events of the night in his mind, wondering what more he could have done, but to this day, no-one has suggested that he has any cause to reproach himself. There is universal agreement that the treatment given by Dr Keilloh was exemplary, and that Baha Mousa’s death was not due to any shortcomings in the medical care he received.
Dr Keilloh left the army in 2005 at the end of his fixed-term commission, going on to become a successful and highly-regarded GP in Northallerton. When evidence emerged that some detainees at Basra, including Baha Mousa, had been mistreated, a court martial tried four soldiers, one of whom was found guilty and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. Dr Keilloh was called as a witness at that time, but no charges were made against him. He subsequently appeared before the Baha Mousa public enquiry in 2008, and again there was no suggestion that he had lied about events in Iraq.
Subsequently, a delayed complaint concerning Dr Keilloh was made to the General Medical Council (GMC). They are strangely coy about the source of the referral, but there is general acceptance that the complainant was Phil Shiner, whose Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) specialize in bringing cases against British soldiers for alleged war crimes in Iraq. This is the same PIL which was recently forced to admit that there was no evidence to substantiate their claims that troops in Iraq had illegally killed up to 20 civilians. The al-Sweady enquiry initiated by PIL collapsed earlier this year, by which time it had been sitting for 167 days, consuming £22 million of public money. To some observers familiar with Dr Keilloh’s case, much of the evidence in that enquiry sounded familiar, despite the fact that it related to different events and was delivered by different witnesses.
Shiner alleged that Derek Keilloh must have seen evidence of Baha Mousa’s mistreatment and should have reported it to his superior officers. This assertion was largely based on the fact that photographs of Baha Mousa’s body appear to show evidence of physical abuse. The photographs concerned had been taken six days post-mortem, after his corpse had been driven 20 miles in a body bag to the nearest morgue. Dr Keilloh has repeatedly and consistently denied seeing any such evidence of mistreatment as he struggled to revive his patient in the gloom and heat of Basra, and it is widely accepted that bruising can evolve post-mortem even in the best of conditions. These were not the best of conditions.
Nevertheless, the GMC decided there was a case to answer, and their Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) hearing commenced in June 2012. After unacceptable, stress-inducing dithering, they finally reached a verdict just before Christmas 2012. Let’s hear some of the things the panel said about Derek Keilloh: he was ‘a man of good character; a highly respected and dedicated doctor with excellent clinical skills who is trusted and respected by colleagues and patients alike; an honest, decent man of integrity’. They concluded: ‘The Panel is satisfied that you do not pose a risk to patients. It has a large amount of information before it that you are an excellent doctor’.
So – not guilty, then? Back to work with you? Not a bit of it. They decided that, ‘on the balance of probabilities’ (the standard of proof required by the GMC to deprive a doctor of his profession and his or her patients of their doctor), he had lied about his awareness of the mistreatment of prisoners, and that they had ‘no alternative’ to erasing his name from the medical register. When the GMC was criticized recently by the High Court in relation to another unsafe verdict against a GP, their lawyer defended the organization by re-iterating its overriding responsibility to protect the public. But just who were they protecting from Derek Keilloh – this ‘honest, decent man of integrity’, this ‘excellent doctor’?
I worked in a military field hospital in the Middle East, and can imagine the conditions that faced the young, unprepared Dr Keilloh. The MTPS panel claimed to recognize and allow for this, but then proceeded to judge him as if he were a civilian GP working in a pleasant, UK surgery with ready access to advice and support from his seniors. Reading the transcript of the hearing it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their verdict was based on a desire to punish, rather than on a proportionate response to the facts of the case, or concern for the welfare of patients.
Compare this to the case of Mohammed Kassim Al-Byati, a doctor who appeared before the MPTS in 2013, again on the basis of events in Iraq many years earlier. It found that he had known that his patients had been tortured, and that they would be tortured again when they left his care. Did the MPTS erase his name from the Register? No, they merely suspended him from practising for ‘up to 12 months’. So, despite the panel’s assertion, there were alternatives available, even if they thought Dr Keilloh was guilty.
The GMC runs the risk of alienating both the doctors it is supposed to be regulating, and the public it should be protecting. Its disciplinary decisions often seem to be inconsistent and conflicting: on the one hand, they deprive Derek Keilloh’s patients of the services of a GP who they themselves declare to pose no risk; on the other, they have, for example, been criticised for allowing doctors convicted of sex offences to remain on the register.
But for now, Derek Keilloh’s career is effectively over, and his patients have been deprived of the care of a GP recognized as ‘excellent’ by the GMC, at a time when GP services are under greater pressure than ever. All this because the disciplinary panel decided he mighthave fallen short in his duties as a whistle-blower in the heat of war 11 years ago. If anyone thinks that is fair or sensible, they will need to explain it to me. Carefully.
Baha Mousa undoubtedly suffered a great injustice, which cost him his life. Derek Keilloh, the man who tried to save him, is still alive, but he has been deprived of his career. He is the second victim of the Baha Mousa affair.