Asylum Detention Challenges

posted: 23/03/2010

The harsh treatment faced by detained women and children seeking asylum - including women and children with HIV - who are held at Yarl’s Wood will now be closely considered by both the High Court and the British Medical Association.
 

Three Human Rights Abused
"Lawyers have been granted permission to challenge the government's detention policy, which they claim amounts to "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of women and children.

The High Court has given the go-ahead for a judicial review of the cases of four women held at the Yarl’s Wood detention centre after lawyers claimed their treatment breaches articles three, five and eight of the European convention on human rights. This comes very soon after many women have ended a 5 week hunger strike in protest at the conditions and their treatment.

Jim Duffy, a solicitor at Public Interest Lawyers, which is bringing the case, welcomed the decision. "The case confronts the policy and practice of the Home Office and the private company running Yarls Wood, Serco."
 

Three Yarl's Wood doctors investigated
Three doctors working at Yarl's Wood immigration detention centre are facing investigation by the General Medical Council, amid calls for healthcare at the centre to be transferred from the private sector to the NHS. Alistair Burt, Tory MP for North East Bedfordshire, (containing Yarl’s Wood) described healthcare as the weak link and that this weakness can only be ended by transferring healthcare to the NHS.
 

As he points out: "If there is an issue over fitness to travel and the decision is made by a contracted company inside Yarl's Wood, what chance is there of having confidence that it has not been influenced by the contract given to the contractors to get people out of the country?"

More details from Medical Justice 1 and Medical Justice 2 and Medical Justice 3
 
 

Key Man for HIV Dies

posted: 18/01/2010

Sir Donald Acheson, who has died aged 83, was chief medical officer (CMO) between 1983 and 1991. He’s widely recognised as the key policymaker at the start of the UK's drive against HIV. He helped the UK to set a liberal and enlightened example for other countries.
 

The shock of the emergence of a deadly new epidemic, HIV, is only equalled by the shock, in retrospect, of Acheson's success in persuading Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government to adopt a liberal approach to tackling the sexually driven disease.

It involved massive health education programmes, in parallel with detailed plans to accurately track and combat the spread of HIV.

No to compulsory testing and notification

He persuaded ministers to drop plans for the compulsory HIV testing and for making it a compulsory notifiable disease – on the grounds that it would deter people – almost all of them gay men- from seeking help, as earlier exercises with sexual epidemic campaigns had experienced.
The focus was on harm reduction not prohibition. Safe sex rather than no sex. He even obtained Conservative consent to what was, in effect, a scheme which condoned illegal drug use – needle exchanges for drug addicts, which had demonstrated their success in dramatically reducing the spread of HIV in Amsterdam and Berlin.
 

How did he do it? Acheson, born in Belfast and educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, arrived at the Health Department after spending more than 20 years studying diseases in hospitals or medical research units in London, Oxford and Southampton. Better still, in terms of the impending HIV crisis, he was an epidemiologist: an investigator of the causes and control of epidemics. He brought with him an important epidemiological principle: all actions should be based on scientific evidence and, where evidence is lacking, a precautionary principle should be applied.
 

There were just 28 people known to have AIDS in the UK when he started work as CMO. There was no HIV policy and no known cure. One initial challenge facing the new CMO was the need to integrate two separate medical worlds: biomedicine and public health (screening, education, epidemiology).
He also successfully bridged two other groups: the medical world and the gay community, where the disease initially was most prevalent. He set up an informal group of senior medics and public health officials, to which he also invited people from the Terrence Higgins Trust, an HIV charity with its roots in the gay community. From there he moved on to establishing an expert advisory group, which he chaired. [It was not quite like this - see George House Trust comments below]

As one medical historian has noted: "His passionate conviction that this epidemic must be quashed before it could take hold was one of his main strengths in persuading the government and his colleagues to take the disease seriously." She added that Acheson "ate and slept AIDS from 1985 onwards".
 

A large, well-funded and sustained education campaign began in 1986 with press and television adverts along with "AIDS – don't die of ignorance" leaflets circulated to 23m homes. Ministerial press briefings followed. By February 1987, an AIDS week involved 19 hours of public service broadcasting across the four TV channels that existed at the time.
 

The campaign achieved unstoppable momentum. Acheson went on to ¬broker international guidelines within the World Health Organisation, ensuring the dominant ideology remained the British liberal consensus. By the time of his retirement in 1991, HIV in the UK had moved from initial shock through several intermediate phases towards becoming a manageable chronic condition in 1996. Many of the hundreds of hospital beds that had been earmarked were found not to be needed.

Ernest Donald Acheson, medical officer, born 17 September 1926; died 10 January 2010

Source
 

George House Trust comment
 

This edited version of the obituary by Malcolm Dean doesn’t acknowledge how very much more gay men across the country, including in Manchester, contributed. Gay men in the UK were loud and insistent about the need for the government to treat HIV seriously from the very first reports coming out of the USA that started appearing at the beginning of the 1980s, but only in the gay press.

It wasn’t simply Donald Acheson wisely deciding to invite Terrence Higgins Trust to join his informal advisory group. It was gay men demanding to have a say and to be fully involved in advising and deciding government policy and practice. Acheson was able to employ this powerful gay grass roots activism to help him persuade ministers to take some of the more politically unpopular decisions.
 

Investigate HIV and Immigration Detention

posted: 20/11/2009

Medical Justice want a volunteer researcher for its Investigation into the treatment of people with HIV in detention. They want to produce a report that

• Explores the healthcare available for detainees with HIV
• Analyses the experiences of detainees with HIV
• Investigates whether the guidelines for treating detainees with HIV work.

Detailed case studies based on the experiences of detainees and ex-detainees with HIV will be used including examples from Medical Justice.

Apply by       24th November 2009
Interviews     1st December 2009
Job details     Role description, person specification, and application details from Medical Justice

About Medical Justice
Medical Justice is a network of volunteers who expose and challenge medical abuse in immigration detention. Their volunteers include ex-detainees, doctors, lawyers and other experts. They have no formal funding and no paid staff; they rely on private donations and unpaid work by members. Medical Justice is not a charity, nor is it government-funded.
 

Some people with HIV recently helped by Medical Justice
Three of four women who had been receiving anti-retroviral drugs in the community, had an unplanned disruption to their treatment in detention, because of problems in arranging appropriate and timely hospital care. Some detainees were not given the results of their positive HIV test until taken to the airport for deportation. Some rape survivors have been denied an HIV test.

Medical Justice 86 Durham Road London N7 7DT           0207 561 7498         email
 

York Hospital Loses HIV Notes

posted: 07/04/2009

Confidential medical records with details of 19 seriously-ill York Hospital patients were found in the street two miles away.

An investigation has now been launched about how the file, picked up by a passer-by, was lost.

The document revealed their name, age and medical history – with one person having HIV and syphilis.

The people affected were mainly elderly, except one 27-year-old. The hospital has apologised and is now investigating what happened.

HIV, confidentiality and stigma

Paul Ward, deputy chief executive of the Terence Higgins Trust said: "This breach is totally unacceptable. For anyone with HIV who is facing stigma, having personal information about their health being inadvertently made public is very worrying."

It could be difficult for a complex organisation like a hospital to get it right all the time, he added, but people trusted them.

"If there has been a failing we ask York Hospital to redouble its efforts to make sure it is able to ensure full confidentiality in the future."

Other patients had breast cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. Handwritten notes found in the bundle gave details about their personal nursing care.

Mike Proctor, deputy chief executive of York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: "We take the protection of all patient information very seriously and we apologise to any of our patients and their families who may have been caused distress by this potential breach of their confidentiality."

The patients concerned would be contacted and reassured, he said. Policies on staff responsibilities for such information were clear. "We are appalled that details of this nature have been found outside the hospital."

He added that the trust was investigating the incident and would take appropriate action.

The papers were found by an unidentified person.

Source

Saved - Medical Data Confidentiality

posted: 09/03/2009

After eight healthcare organisations published a joint letter calling on the Ministry of Justice to rethink its data sharing proposals in the Coroners and Justice Bill, Justice minister Straw has bowed to the pressure over data sharing.

Jack Straw has now said he will scrap his controversial proposals that would have allowed patients' medical and DNA records to be shared with police, foreign governments and other bodies.

In a victory for civil liberties campaigners, the justice secretary bowed to public pressure over the data-sharing provisions in the coroners' and justice bill, which would have allowed public bodies to exchange data without the knowledge or consent of individuals involved. Doctors and the Bar Council had joined privacy campaigners in warning of the potential risks to public trust.

"Absolutely no part of the purpose of this legislation was to extend a Big Brother society - quite the reverse - but I understand people's anxiety," Straw stated. "I have never had a piece of legislation that was not improved by public debate during its passage through parliament."

He will now launch a fresh public consultation on how to implement more limited proposals from a review chaired by the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, which would allow government bodies to share information where there is clear benefit - for example, to ensure that bereaved families do not have to contact a string of official agencies to tell them someone has died.

The U-turn follows the Scottish government's decision late last week to withdraw support.