Ashya King: Southampton hospital staff 'receive abuse'

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Northerner

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Staff at the UK hospital where brain tumour patient Ashya King was treated have been inundated with abusive calls and emails, it has been revealed.

The five-year-old was removed from Southampton General Hospital by his parents, against medical advice, sparking an international hunt.

His parents were arrested in Spain, prompting a public outcry.

In her blog, hospital trust chief executive Fiona Dalton said paediatric oncology staff had been targeted.

She said: "When their email inboxes were full of personal abuse from strangers, and there were journalists camped on their front door, they were still worrying about how we could do the best thing for a small boy in Spain...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-29158081

Personally, I think this is awful :( I think they were right to do what they did - the parents just disappeared with a seriously ill child. No-one knew where he was or if he was being looked after properly, he had to be found. Imagine the uproar if the family had failed to feed him properly and nothing had been done to find them until it was too late :(
 
I think they should all be sacked. The parents have rights and above all a natural desire to do what they believe is right for their child, and it is them who have to live with what they decide and there could be nothing worse than thinking they could have done more after the child has died. To the doctors it's just another body, to the parents it is their own flesh and blood.
 
I'm with Northie - it's the health of a child at stake, he is clearly very sick and the doctors had no clue where he was and whether his parents had all the necessary medical equipment with them. Of course they are going to react! The parents must be under a great deal of stress and not everyone can think clearly and plan ahead under those circumstances. I'm with the policeman who said he'd rather be taking flak for overreacting than not doing anything when a child's life might be at stake. They can't win, can they.

I agree that the parents have the right to seek a better treatment for their child if they think it will help him, but they should have told someone what they were doing. They clearly are a loving family who knew what they were doing and had made all the necessary arrangements to look after their son en route, but the hospital didn't know that. If they were afraid that the doctors would try to stop them, then surely it wasn't beyond them to make a phone call to tell someone that their child was safe and that they had all the necessary equipment to run the feeding machine?

I agree that being arrested and separated from their son in Spain was going too far, once they had been found and had had a chance to explain themselves they should have been left alone. But maybe if they had told the hospital what they were doing before they left the uk that might have been avoided.
 
I think it was a very tricky situation, if the hospital hadn't raised the alarm and something had happened to the wee tot they'd have been crucified for it. His parents have a right to seek the best treatment for their child but they took him against medical advice, and whilst they have a right to protect their child they don't have the right of life and death, so there has to be a level of protection because sadly not all parents have the best interest of their child at heart. Let me be clear if it was my child and I disagreed with treatment and I had to you're damn right I'd take them to the place I thought they'd get the best treatment, and they'd have to tackle me to the ground to get through me, but I'd accept the consequences of my actions. In my opinion the actions of the police possibly need to be considered because it's not in the best interest of the child to be alone in a hospital not able to communicate and isolated from his family, but that was more an issue of international law than the fault of our child protection system. We can't have it all ways, we can't stand in moral uproar when a child is murdered by their parent, blame social services, the teachers, medical professionals, because they did nothing, then criticise them for taking action because as it turns out the parents were trying to do the right thing.
 
Well said Kooky.

Also, the child hadn't been officially discharged from the hospital, had he, which means technically he's still under their care. If patients regularly just disappeared from hospitals, whether they are children or adults, and the hospital staff just said "oh there's another one discharged themselves/ gone to seek better treatment" without actually checking that they understood how to continue to care for themselves, there might be a bit of an outcry!
 
Sally71 said:
Well said Kooky.

Also, the child hadn't been officially discharged from the hospital, had he, which means technically he's still under their care. If patients regularly just disappeared from hospitals, whether they are children or adults, and the hospital staff just said "oh there's another one discharged themselves/ gone to seek better treatment" without actually checking that they understood how to continue to care for themselves, there might be a bit of an outcry!
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I think this is the point. Let's face it, there are all sorts of 'special' treatments you can read about on the internet, and not all the parents can actually distinguish the genuine from the bogus. I think in this case the parents feared that the child would be made a ward of court, leaving them helpless. Wasn't there a similar case a few months ago where a mother took her child away - I think that was against the wishes of the father and they were separated.
 
From all that I have read it just sounds like the doctor got the hump due to the parents having the audacity to question his judgement, and lets face it it's not like the NHS doesn't have a track record of putting finance before clinical needs we complain about it all the time on here.


For the parents to even spend 1 second in police custody when all they wanted was whats best is a total joke and angered me more than any news item I had read in the last ten years.


If the hospital had helped them decide whats best instead of just playing god we wouldn't we reading about this. They could have handled it so much better and it is they who put the fears into the parents and then did nothing to help them cope with such fears. This piece written after their release was quite telling in some details.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...nts-told-southampton-hospital-take-son-abroad
 
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I am just glad that the family are re-united. My heart ached for that poor little boy alone in a strange hospital without his Mum and Dad - he must have been so frightened.
 
I would agree that once they were located and the boy was seen to be OK there was no need for the police to be involved any further.
 
Northerner said:
I would agree that once they were located and the boy was seen to be OK there was no need for the police to be involved any further.
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Yet even after the intervention of the prime minister and other leading politicians the social services for his area organised a meeting to decide what to do with the child.

Totally astonishing how far from reality some of the idiots have got themselves.
It is easy for us to be calm and rational when the sick child is not ours. These parents were probably feeling rather desperate and may not be acting with utmost rationality, but that does not excuse the huge over reaction by the State who in this case were driven by doctors.

I dread to think if this had happened in a time where the parents couldn't have used social media to put their very good case across in such a professional way, as it would very much likely have meant they would lose the child they loved so much.
 
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