Complaint about Rumer’s care, part 2

Covering letter (Appendix 1)

• Appendix 1: Covering letter with this document

First of all, apologies to anyone who’s been waiting for us to get on with publishing our complaint as promised in October! We had some website issues to deal withthese are on track now and further updates should follow more quickly.

Below is the covering letter we sent with our (very long!) complaint about Rumer’s care (also included in the complaint document itself as Appendix 1).

Complaint about Rumer's care, part 1

One year ago today...

Today, 24th October 2017, marks a double anniversary. Not only is it Rumer's 25-month birthday, it is also one year today since we submitted a complaint to the hospitals that provided her care.

After Rumer died, we made requests under the Data Protection and Access to Medical Records acts for not only Rumer's hospital notes, but also all meeting minutes, emails and so on pertaining to her and/or us. It took us a long time to get them all and they came piecemeal and in no particular order. Even now, it seems unlikely that we have all the documents there were. For example, it has been claimed that one significant meeting was not minuted and that consultant meetings are routinely unminuted.

The myth of the irrational parent

Will parents really do anything to save their child?

This article by Zoe Williams in the Guardian today is just another in a long line of articles about the case of Charlie Gard saying exactly the same thing.

The accepted message is:

• The doctors are dispassionate and able to accept that the child is desperately ill and there is nothing to be done.
• The parents are desperate to save their child at any cost, will do anything at all to save him and are behaving in an irrational way; however this is okay because any parent would do the same.