Sleepy multicultural doctor in Britain
Except for his ethnicity, he would have been given the boot ages ago. He clearly should not be on a ward
A doctor who fell asleep during a meeting held to discuss the death of a youngster on a children's hospital ward was also caught napping three times in one night shift, it has been claimed.
Dr Chinedu Bosah, 39, faces disciplinary action after apparently falling asleep on five occasions while working at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough.
The second year junior doctor also faces questions about his performance after shocked colleagues reported his alleged lack of 'basic medical knowledge', the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in Manchester heard.
The tribunal heard yesterday how Dr Bosah first fell asleep at work between September 2012 and December 2012 and was caught nodding off in various places on the children's unit including the seminar room and the parents' room.
He is also accused of falling asleep in a meeting with a panel of medics as they held a debrief about the treatment of a child who died while on the paediatric unit.
On one occasion when confronted, he claimed that he was tired because he had been 'studying for exams' but was found sleeping on the job again within a week and fell asleep three times during a night shift on December 22, 2012 it was claimed.
Dr Bosah, who was training in paediatrics, also took unauthorised breaks and days off work and was often difficult to contact, the tribunal heard.
He allegedly shocked senior doctors with his lack of medical knowledge - on one occasion offering to send a baby suffering with jaundice home when it was clear the infant required treatment.
On another occasion he left a medical student to administer oxygen to a newborn baby, even though it required a special 'technique' not taught to students.
Dr Bosah was called into various meetings about his performance and was offered help with his e-portfolio – a case file he had to complete as part of his training plan as required by medical and health care organisations. However, he refused help from senior colleagues telling them he was 'doing well with it'.
He later failed a number of Royal College of Paediatric and Child Health exams and was sacked from the training programme in February last year.
He admitted a catalogue of failings during his training but denies charges of ordering incorrect blood tests for patients and refutes claims his basic medical knowledge was inadequate for a doctor of his experience.
Between September 2012 and July 2013, Dr Bosah also attended training programmes on a 'rotation' at the University Hospital of North Durham and another hospital in the north east of England.
Representing the General Medical Council, Robin Kitching said: 'Things didn't go well from the outset of that rotation.
'It's fair to say the discipline of paediatrics was not something Dr Bosah was suited to and that played a part in his poor performance during the relevant period. But his problems weren't just restricted to paediatrics, the issues were more wide-ranging than that.
'He seemed to be blind to the fact things were going as badly as they were despite all the meetings that took place. For someone struggling as badly as him, he failed to appreciate he was in real difficulty and the problems were not being resolved.
'Every training course will have doctors who struggle and the nature of the courses is to identify doctors who are struggling and to offer them help to ensure they improve. These are issues which ought to be ironed out at a local stage. Despite best efforts, he was simply unable to improve his performance.'
Mr Kitching also said highlighted the meeting about a child's death in which Dr Bosah fell asleep. He told the tribunal: 'The nature of the meeting is a review held in the wake of the death of a child. 'There is no suggestion Dr Bosah played any particular role in the care of the child and no suggestion he or anyone else failed to treat the child appropriately, but these are important departmental meetings.
'Dr Jonathan Wylie noticed he had fallen asleep during the meeting and spoke to him about his behaviour. Dr Bosah said he had been studying for exams, which is something all trainees have to do.
'He also fell asleep three times during one overnight shift. This was behaviour reported to Dr Wylie by another witness, Mrs Sarah Brooks, a senior nurse often in charge of the neo-natal unit.
'While in charge she found Dr Bosah asleep on various occasions during the same shift. She was concerned and asked if anything was wrong that made him not sleep through the day.
'She was worried why he was sleeping so much she reported it to the consultant. He had slept in various places on the unit including the seminar room and the parents' room. It was pointed out to him at the time that this was inappropriate.'
Mr Kitching also told the tribunal how Dr Bosah left a newborn baby in the care of a medical student while he contacted his supervisor during a shift on November 9, 2012.
He said: 'He left a student to administer positive and expiratory pressure. It is admitted by the doctor and demonstrates poor judgement and a lack of knowledge or skill on the part of the doctor. 'He admitted it at the time and acknowledged he ought not to have left a baby with a medical student.
'He went to contact his supervisor and that suggests he didn't know the process involved more than merely holding the mask on the face. It is particularly technical.'
Dr Bosah is also accused of not knowing how to administer pressurised air to twins born at 29 weeks gestation.
The tribunal also heard how he was required to attend at least 70 per cent of teaching sessions but attended none of a possible seven.
Dr Bosah has admitted not responding to the efforts of the Trainee Support Services to assist him following a referral in June 2013, where he declined to attend a problem solving workshop, declined to attend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and declined help with his e-portfolio.
He has admitted taking unauthorised absences from work on July 17, 2013 and November 27, 28 and 29 of the same year and accepts he failed the first part of his Royal College of Paediatric and Child Health exams on six separate occasions.
However, he denies that he failed to perform as a trainee because he was unable to carry out baby checks in a reasonable amount of time, was unable to formulate adequate management plans for the complex patients, his patient handovers were inadequate and the information he provided to colleagues about patients was sometimes contradictory.
SOURCE
The Battle of Indiana and the Promise of Battles to Come
The dust is clearing from the Twitter and Facebook battlefields, the people of Indiana are out from under the white-hot glare of the national media, and both sides are taking stock. Who won the Battle of Indiana? Who lost? What’s next for religious liberty in America?
While conservative pessimists looked at Indiana, watched its politicians immediately compromise, and saw defeat, a closer look shows something else: a cultural stalemate. Nobody truly won in Indiana. From the grassroots to the intellectual elite, conservatives are girding themselves for the long war, and a long war it will be.
Four truths are emerging: First, the battle is not between gay rights and religious liberty—although religious liberty is certainly at stake—but between the sexual revolution and Christianity itself. This means that Christians are faced not with allegedly “minor” or “insignificant” theological changes to gain leftist acceptance, but with wholesale changes to the historical doctrines of the church.
Second, not a single orthodox denomination is making or even contemplating such changes. This means that tens of millions of Americans will remain—indefinitely—opposed to the continued expansion of the sexual revolution.
Third, rather than going quietly, cultural conservatism is showing increasing strength at the grassroots—opposing leftist campaigns at the ground level, bypassing politics to support those most embattled by radical hate campaigns.
And fourth, the conservative grassroots and conservative public intellectuals are united—from Ross Douthat at his lonely perch at the New York Times to the pages of National Review and the Weekly Standard, from First Things to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, there is no wavering among America’s most influential conservative writers and thinkers.
In short, if the cultural Left is hoping to dominate the culture—and feels strong in its coastal bastions—it is overreaching, extending beyond the limits of its power. It is exposing itself to embarrassing cultural defeats and succeeding mainly in hardening conservative resolve. In the fight over religious freedom, the Left will not prevail.
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First, a bit of history. The battle of Indiana began when Indiana’s legislature passed a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), an act that provided, simply enough, that any state action that substantially burdens religious exercise is lawful only if it is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest. In other words—as Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner recently tweeted—when you can, you should avoid compelling people to act against their consciences.
This legal standard was common enough. In fact, it’s the same general legal standard in the federal RFRA and in similar RFRAs in 19 other states. There were, however, two differences from the norm. First, the statute explicitly allowed for-profit businesses to assert religious liberty rights (something the Supreme Court allowed Hobby Lobby to do in its challenge, under the federal RFRA, to the Obamacare contraception mandate). Second, the statute allowed a religious individual to utilize RFRA in defense against a lawsuit brought by a private party. In other words, if a person believed that his religious liberty could be substantially burdened by a court order resulting from private litigation, that person could assert that the court order would be lawful only if it met the RFRA test.
Neither provision is particularly groundbreaking. The Supreme Court allowed Hobby Lobby and other closely-held private, for-profit corporations to assert RFRA claims. Additionally, multiple federal circuits provide for the use of federal RFRA as a defense against a private right of action.
Moreover, RFRA and the compelling interest standard more broadly have long existed in American law. The compelling interest standard was not something invented by Congress when it passed RFRA in 1993. RFRA was passed to restore religious liberty to the same level of protection it received prior to the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which rejected decades of precedent to hold essentially that religious liberty claims are inferior to rules of general applicability. Smith caused a bipartisan outcry, and Congress moved quickly to overturn the decision, passing RFRA with overwhelming majorities. President Clinton proudly signed it into law.
Conservatives saw Smith as a threat to the constitutional order, a dangerous derogation of our nation’s “first liberty.” Liberals saw Smith as a threat to smaller, minority religions. The dispute in the case arose over the use of peyote, a hallucinogenic drug, in Native American religious rituals. It’s safe to say that there was no sense at the time that RFRA was a threat to civil liberties or civil rights. Indeed, RFRA was seen as necessary—again, by liberals and conservatives alike—to protect civil rights.
There was good reason for this belief. For decades, the compelling interest standard in religious liberty claims had existed side-by-side with the explosive growth of nondiscrimination laws, and religious liberty claims had never been successfully used to strike down nondiscrimination statutes. In fact, in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises (1968), the pre-Smith Supreme Court called a business owner’s argument that he had a free exercise right to deny service to black customers “patently frivolous.”
This comes as no surprise to religious liberty attorneys who actually read the law and know how it operates in real-life litigation. It’s a historical fact that religious liberty claims did not protect or legally enable Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Acts were passed and prospered under the pre-Smith religious liberty regime.
Regardless, the sexual revolution marches on and the Left’s definition of “civil rights” has expanded—not only does it prohibit class-based discrimination in places of public accommodation, it now requires conscription into the revolution itself.
For example, it’s no longer enough for employees to have access to low-cost contraceptives and abortifacients. It’s the Obama administration’s position that employers must provide them free of charge. It’s no longer enough for bakers, florists, and photographers to provide service to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. They must participate in and facilitate any kind of action or ceremony their customers desire—no matter how offensive to their beliefs—so long as those ceremonies further the ideals of the sexual revolutionaries.
So, when Indiana passed its RFRA, the bipartisan consensus of years past was gone—long gone. The mainstream media exploded. Twitter exploded. Major corporations like Apple and Cummins—and Wal-Mart, when similar legislation passed the Arkansas legislature—condemned RFRA. The NCAA followed suit. Deep-blue city governments, including those whose states had RFRA laws on the books for years, banned official travel to Indiana.
When reporters went searching for an Indiana business—anywhere in the state—that wouldn’t cater a gay wedding, it found Memories Pizza, a small-town pizza joint that had never been asked to cater a gay wedding, but whose owner answered that if it was, it couldn’t participate. An avalanche of hate, including alleged death threats, caused the owners temporarily to close their doors.
Critics disingenuously raised the specter of Jim Crow, recalled memories of the old South, and otherwise claimed that gay people were about to be sent to the back of the bus. Facts didn’t matter. Legal precedents didn’t matter. All that mattered was the thought that someone, somewhere, might try to raise RFRA as a defense for refusing to participate in a gay wedding.
Under pressure from activists and the national media, Indiana modified its law to state that it could not authorize a provider to deny services to anyone on the basis of multiple protected criteria, including race, sex, and sexual orientation. The “Indiana fix” soon led to a different “Arkansas fix.” Both fixes mollified the media and most gay rights activists, infuriated many conservatives—who saw them as cowardly—and placated the major corporations. The battle was over.
The battle may be over, but the war rages on. While many conservatives saw the quick capitulations by Indiana and Arkansas politicians and despaired (just as leftist activists exulted), the reality was far more complex and the presumed leftist victory far less clear. In reality, the battle lines are drawn, and there is little or no reason to believe that either side will triumph anytime soon.
Browbeating Christians into submission is not a new tactic, and it is a tactic that has largely failed in the abortion arena—despite the existence of legal doctrines that are dramatically skewed against the pro-life movement. Yet the pro-life movement is as strong as it has ever been, and political outcomes are finally starting to reflect that strength, with jurisdiction after jurisdiction passing ever-stronger pro-life laws.
More HERE
A totally "incorrect" diet that works perfectly well
The food freaks wouldn't believe this but there have also been previous examples of obsessional people surviving quite well on extremely narrow diets. Where are the 5 veg a day we are all supposed to "need"?
Many of us enjoy beans on toast as a simple and comforting dinner. But Gary Watkinson eats three plates of the snack a day, and claims he has never eaten anything else. And despite his bizarre addiction, doctors have told the 25-year-old he is perfectly healthy.
Mr Watkinson, from Huddersfield, said: 'Ever since I can remember, from when I was a kid, I have only eaten beans, toast and chips.
'My mum used to give me plates of other food for me to try and I would just throw it on the floor. I would only eat beans.'
* He doesn't eat any fruit or vegetables, or any other kind of carbohydrates or cereal.*
'I get up in the morning and have beans on toast for breakfast, then again for lunch and dinner,' he said. 'I don't even have cheese on it. When I tell people they can't believe it.'
He became worried about his restricted diet after reading a story about a girl who died aged 22 from eating a similar diet. But booked a medical check-up with a doctor, and was told he was in good health.
He said: 'They took my blood sample but it all came back healthy. 'They told me I was fine. I'm actually quite slim and only weigh 11 stone.'
According to the NHS, three heaped tablespoons of baked beans counts as one of the five portions of fruit and vegetables the Government recommends eating every day as part of a healthy diet.
Baked beans contain around 164 calories per half a can and contain protein and fibre as well as calcium, potassium and some iron.
Nutritionists said high levels of fibre in the beans means he will not be constipated, which can lead to ill health and cancer.
They also contain enough fat to provide him with energy, although his levels are likely to be low.
'I don't know why I won't eat anything else, I just never have and can't stomach the thought of other foods. 'When I socialise with my mates and they all order pizza, I don't take part. They can't understand it.'
The only time he has ever eaten another food group in his life is when he went travelling in Indonesia, and was forced to eat chips.
He said: 'When you go abroad, beans just aren't on the menu. So when I go travelling I just eat chips. 'If I go into a fish and chip shop I always carry about £30 worth of cash on me so they don't think I'm just a tramp ordering chips on their own. 'If I'm in a restaurant too, that's all I'll eat.'
SOURCE
Stalinist British social workers again
Their Marxist social work education makes them hate normal families
Relaxing at their lovely family home this week, Victoria Seymour cuddles her daughters Georgia and Grace as though she will never let them out of her sight.
Life is beginning to get back to normal for the family after a nightmare ordeal in which — after a throwaway remark from Georgia at school — social workers seized the girls, put them in foster homes and threatened never to let them return to their parents.
The two children had been told off by Victoria for squabbling in the kitchen. She ordered them to stay indoors for the weekend, with no computer games or TV.
Faced with this dreary prospect, Georgia, the eldest, complained to her primary school teacher that she was ‘frightened’ to go home.
As 38-year-old Victoria explained to the Mail this week: ‘Georgia concocted the story to try to avoid a boring Saturday and Sunday. Without even checking the truth with me, the social workers just stepped in and tore our family apart on the word of a naughty child.’
Victoria and her husband Alan found themselves being investigated for emotionally and physically abusing the girls, then aged 11 and nine, by child protection staff, health workers and even the police, after they had returned from their home in Australia to care for Alan’s mother in England.
It was only after a three-month battle that the couple won the girls back and then fled to Australia. There’s one thing of which they are certain: they will never again set foot in Britain, where they were both born.
The Seymours have begun legal action against Bridport social services in Dorset for breaching their human rights and causing their children mental anguish.
During their stay here, they came within a whisker of losing their beloved girls. This couple are speaking out because they want to warn other families what could happen to them.
Forcibly seizing children for adoption — which is what the Seymours were told was on the cards for Georgia and Grace — is unheard of in other countries.
England and Wales stand alone in Europe in their readiness to take away children without their parents’ consent.
A damning Council of Europe report on child protection, published last month, warned: ‘England and Wales are unique in placing so many children for adoption, in particular in the young age group which is “popular” in its adoption market.’
It said 80 per cent of babies and under-fives ‘forcibly taken’ from their families by social workers are never returned, but are adopted by ‘strangers’.
Olga Borzova, a Russian member of the council’s social affairs committee, who wrote the report after a fact-finding visit, criticised the number of children removed from parents in Britain, including those from foreign families visiting or working here.
The numbers have provoked protests to the Government and to Sir James Munby, the head of the family courts, from ambassadors and government representatives of 34 countries, including Russia, Nigeria, Latvia, India and the Czech Republic.
In France, the Senate (the upper house of parliament) has approved a change in the Republic’s law to stop French children here being removed for adoption.
The legislation says: ‘Children of French families living abroad must be returned to France... in particular to avoid forced adoption without permission of the biological parents. This type of situation exists in particular in the UK.’
Slovakia’s Ministry of Justice is threatening to take the UK to the European Court of Human Rights after at least 30 of its young citizens — including babies — were taken from their mothers.
And the Latvian government has written in protest to the leader of the House of Commons because in the past three years, 136 Latvian children living here have been ‘illegally or forcibly’ adopted by British families.
In response to the international furore, Sir James has said judges and social workers must not ‘seize control’ of foreign children and their future must be decided by courts in their own country.
But his words have a hollow ring for the Seymours, who so nearly lost their daughters within weeks of arriving in England.
Alan, 58, emigrated down under with his parents in 1967. While on holiday in the UK in 2006, he met Victoria, who had two daughters — Georgia and Grace. The couple married in 2010 and settled in Canberra, where the girls enjoyed — as their parents say ruefully — all of life’s so-called ‘essentials’, including iPads and their own computers.
They admit their daughters were spoiled, precocious and, though intelligent, academically lazy. ‘Both spent far too much time at school socialising and being disruptive in class,’ says Alan.
The family’s terrifying brush with social services came after Alan’s father, who retired back to Britain, died suddenly on Christmas Day 2011, aged 81.
Alan’s ailing mother was left in shock and unable to look after herself at her home in Salwayash, near Bridport. Alan felt he had a duty to step in. He resigned as an account manager in Australia, and the family travelled back to Britain the following year.
They moved into his mother’s four-bedroom house and, in the autumn of 2012, the girls started at Bridport primary school. There were problems from the start.
The children found themselves struggling to cope at school because the system was different to Australia. The girls say they were bullied by other pupils over their accents and soon began to resist going to school.
Alan’s mother was also unhappy with what Victoria and Alan call the ‘invasion of her home by two young, vibrant, energetic and extremely vocal girls’.
It was not a perfect situation for any family. Meanwhile, short of money, Alan and Victoria were trying to set up a business as freight-forwarding agents.
The girls were missing their friends and their laissez-faire Australian lifestyle. And then, only a few weeks after the start of term, social services in Bridport began to take an interest.
‘Our youngest, Grace, said something at school about it being “torture” at home,’ says Alan. ‘The next thing, a social worker was on the phone to Victoria and, at a meeting later that day, threatened to take not just Grace, but both our girls away if necessary.’
Of course, there are always two sides to any story and the social worker — having been alerted by the school — must have been alarmed that a nine-year-old child had made such a remark.
The Seymours see it differently. ‘We kept asking ourselves: “How can a servant of the state act in such an aggressive, offensive, invasive and draconian manner on the uncorroborated word of a disorientated small girl?”’ says Alan.
Yet as a result of the couple’s honesty, Victoria was ordered to attend a series of ‘Child in Need’ meetings with both girls to have her parenting skills assessed by Bridport children’s services.
She was warned by social workers that if she did not turn up or was deemed to be ‘unco-operative’, the state had powers to take the girls into care and put them up for adoption.
When the meetings did not materialise on three occasions because social workers failed to arrive, had not been briefed or were on holiday, the Seymours dared to hope their nightmare had passed and would prove to be just a hiccup in their lives.
But they could not have been more wrong. The girls were increasingly unhappy and disruptive in class. At home, the Seymours were also battling with their behaviour. Less than a year after the family had arrived from Australia, in early June 2013, Georgia started the social services’ ball rolling again when she told a teacher she was ‘too frightened to go home’.
The night before, she and her sister had been warned they would be grounded the following weekend without TV or computers. ‘We think the threat of being grounded was the catalyst,’ says Alan. ‘Normally we would tick them off and the whole incident would be forgotten within an hour.
‘Because they had been squabbling loudly in the kitchen, we had said they should stay in and spend the weekend helping us clean the house.’
To the horror of Victoria and Alan, immediately after Georgia’s unfortunate remark, the girls were marched out of school and sent to a foster home.
A fortnight later, there was a conference called by Bridport social services, which decided they would be placed under a care protection order.
A report afterwards stated: ‘We are of the view that while there was no specific injury to either of the children, there are clearly issues around child safety according to statements made by the girls.’
Frustrated and upset, Alan and Victoria wrote to Bridport children’s services saying they wanted the girls returned to them ‘within 24 hours’. The response was ‘swift and merciless’, they say. Social workers successfully applied for an emergency protection order, formalising the fostering arrangement at the local court.
During the rest of the summer, the girls were moved from one foster placement to another, and were begging, in phone calls, to come home.
‘Our girls had come to realise that life in foster care is stricter than at home, with even more restrictions on tidiness, access to TV and standards of behaviour,’ says Victoria.
Allowed only occasional weekend visits to their parents, the girls were saying they were frightened at the foster homes. Twice, they had bruises on their faces and bodies, which social workers insisted was because they had been fighting each other. The girls told an entirely different story to their parents.
In an email to social workers, the Seymours said that younger daughter Grace was ‘petrified at night and crying until she vomited’, while the only reaction from her foster mother was to ‘bang on the door and tell her to be quiet’.
The email added: ‘Grace says she feels very sad, lonely and missed not having one of us to come in and cuddle her.’
Alan and Victoria hired a lawyer, bombarded Bridport social workers with emails, and put up a determined fight.
Their solicitor was so worried the children would never be returned that he privately advised the family to escape to France, taking Georgia and Grace with them, when they next made a weekend visit.
However, the family had another plan — they had decided to escape Britain and return to their home in Australia, taking the girls and Alan’s mother, too.
But then something dramatic happened. The couple had just told the girls and social workers they had bought flight tickets back to Canberra when Victoria received a phone call from Bridport social services’ department.
It was from a senior social worker asking if the girls could be returned to their parents that very afternoon between 5pm and 6pm. The care protection order was about to be lifted — without any apology or explanation. At 5.08pm that day in September, Victoria sent Alan, who was at work, a text message saying simply: ‘They are home.’
Within a week, the whole family had left for Canberra, leaving the house and their pet dogs behind.
Last night, Dorset County Council, which oversees Bridport children’s services, said of the Seymour family’s experience: ‘We do not comment on individual cases. ‘The council always considers the best interests of the child and any decision is carefully scrutinised through the proper legal processes.’
Today, Alan says from Australia: ‘We admit we were very lucky compared with other families living in or visiting your country.
‘We fear the vast majority of children taken by social services never get back to their birth families again.
‘Until very recently, Victoria was reluctant to allow the girls out on their own for fear of losing them again if British social workers turned up out of the blue. ‘She would drive them to school and pick them up, even though it is less than a mile away.
‘Victoria constantly checked on the children, at various times of the day and night, to reassure her they were still safe and had not been snatched.’
Finally, he adds: ‘We believe the only reason we got back the girls is because we fought the social workers every step of the way.’
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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