A court in the United Kingdom has awarded £410,000 ($663,000) in damages to 38 plaintiff families for an extraordinary cataloque of neglect, abandonment and abuse at the National Health Service’s Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, England. The incidents occurred between 2002 and 2009. Britain’s Health Secretary said that the case illustrates “the normailisation of cruelty.” One elderly patient was left unwashed for 11 weeks and another was starved to death. [RTE Question More; The Telegraph]
It is noteworthy that the misconduct that gave rise to the lawsuit and the damages must have violated the codes of ethics of the professions involved, which appear to have been largely ineffective. It is not difficult to imagine that some health care workers, finding themselves in the kind of circumstances that seem to have prevailed at the hospital, would experience conflicts with respect to professional standards of conduct and their own conscientious convictions.