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Published: 26 August, 2010

WHY did the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) chief executive take herself off the prestigious medical register?

After nine years ­running the famous ­children’s hospital in Bloomsbury, Dr Jane Collins has decided to become, simply, Jane Collins.

In a statement, she said: “I haven’t practised as a doctor for nine years now. I kept my name on the register for so long because I had worked so hard to get there – but I decided to take my name off this year.”

A spokeswoman for the General Medical Council (GMC) told me this was not uncommon.

“It’s not the kind of thing we keep statistics on but it’s quite common,”she said. “If you are on the register you have a licence to prescribe and see patients and other normal practising privileges. In a management role, you wouldn’t really need it.”

But recent events suggest the motivation may lie elsewhere.

GOSH was heavily criticised after Baby P died from horrific injuries in August 2007.

A few days before his death, a doctor at the paediatric clinic at St Ann’s Hospital in Tottenham, which is run by Great Ormond Street staff, failed to spot that his back was broken.

Any medical practitioner who comes off the GMC’s register would no longer be directly accountable to any proceedings undertaken by that body. 

At the moment, the GMC is investigating several doctors in connection with the Baby P case.

In an interview earlier this year, Dr Kim Holt, a GOSH consultant who worked at St Ann’s at the time, told me she believed Baby P would be alive if concerns she had raised about standards of care had been heeded by managers.

Dr Holt has not been allowed to return to work for the hospital since she went public with her complaint.

She told me yesterday (Thursday) that it was “increasingly clear” that legislation to protect whistleblowers in the NHS, introduced by Frank Dobson as the then health minister, was not working properly.

She is now seeking donations from supporters to fund her ongoing legal negotiations with GOSH.

Visit www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/support-dr-kim-holt.html

Israeli ‘patriot’ hopes for Palestine ‘miracle’

THE plight of the Palestinian Arabs brings out the best and the worst in people.

Any letter published by this newspaper on the stories of death and injuries caused by the Israeli invasion of Gaza will draw scores of replies – angry missives from both sides of the divide.

But a packed audience of about 300 people listened quietly to a talk given by a leading Israeli dissident journalist, Gideon Levy, at the Amnesty HQ in Isling­ton on Tuesday evening.

You might have expected Levy to show the obvious emotion he felt as he described the “moral blindness” of Israelis who seem indifferent to the “atrocities” committed in their name – the deaths of women and children in the bombing raids on Gaza.

He spoke slowly with sardonic wit about how the death of army dogs made the front pages of tabloids in Israel while stories on casualties among the civilians in the raids made it to “page 15 or 16”.

He described how Tel Aviv was one of the most “exciting cities” in the world, how people lived the high life, yet how few of them seemed to care about the destruction of Gaza.

He described it all as the “dehumanisation” of Israelis, many of whom were in a “coma”.

He insisted he was an “Israeli patriot” and equally that he was not a “self-hating Jew”.

Nor was it right that anyone who criticised Israeli actions should be dismissed as an “anti-semite”.

With his quiet delivery it was hard to imagine that here was a typical crusader, a seeker of the truth, who has been at war for 20 years with the authorities in Israel, a man unpopular with his own people. 

Not for him, you felt, would there be any form of self-censorship –  nothing less than the truth would satisfy him.

Yet, he admitted, with a little sadness, the pile of cancellation of subscriptions for his paper, Haaretz, due to his articles, was “growing and growing”.

A member of the audience tried to goad him with a tirade of arguments aimed at demolishing his portrayal of the Israeli army as a cruel occupying force.

“You are liar!” a man in the middle of the hall shouted at him.

But Levy didn’t rise to him.  He even looked a little hurt.

Nor was he hopeful that the coming talks by the Western powers and Russia on Gaza would change anything – not as long as Hamas, who ruled the enclave, were excluded, and the Israeli settlements were not “frozen”.

He had been asked this question by the chairman, the TV presenter, Jon Snow, who thought it would be good to end the meeting on an optimistic note.

Levy said that some people believe in “miracles” – and that if you did, who knows what might happen! Among the audience I noticed the human rights lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman, who is a leading member of the Independent Jewish Voices organisation and Jocelyn Hurndall, the mother of the Tufnell Park youngster, Tom Hurndall, a supporter of the Palestinian cause, who was killed by an Israeli sniper four years ago.

The Punishment of Gaza. By Gideon Levy. Verso Books, £8.99

Are you really retiring, honey?

FRANCES Cuka, who once acted alongside the Hollywood star, Ingrid Berman, is going into retirement – or at least pretending she is. 

It has been more than 50 years since Frances, who lives in Hampstead, graduated from the Guildhall School of Drama, and then went on to establish herself in films and weighty Shakesperean epics – as well as Coronation Street.

On stage, she famously created the role of Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey – a 1960s play about a gay teenager who moved in with a girl to help look after her baby.

It was a Joan Littlewood production and, typically, was very controversial for those times! 

Frances will appear next week at Hampstead’s Pantameters Theatre in a Noel Coward comedy, Waiting in the Wings.

This rarely performed play is set in a retirement home for female members of the acting profession.

“I play a Shakespearean actress – but a Shakespearean actress of the 1930s, so I can do those vocal ‘how’s your father’ with that arresting voice,” she told me.