READER LETTER | Dr Beale a meticulous paediatrician

Having worked with Prof Peter Beale, I can describe what is happening to him now as a case where he has become a victim of his own success.

With a good reputation and a successful track record, many parents entrusted him with the lives of their children as it was assumed, perhaps erroneously, that under his surgical blade, nothing could go wrong.

Being the meticulous paediatric surgeon that he was, few scrub sisters were comfortable scrubbing for him, but if you knew the conditions that need to be created in paediatric surgery you had no problem assisting as a scrub nurse as you knew he was only doing the right thing for his patients.

The outcome of a successfuloperation depends on many factors as everyone in the particular team has to play their part and the overall preoperative patient’s condition also counts. The consent form which parents sign before the operation is done specifically because any operation can result in unintended outcomes and no doctor in their right mind will deliberately cause a patient’s death.

It is sad that Dr Beale is criminalised as a murderer and is going to court, while his anaesthetist was assassinated. If Beale had not been so popular as a paediatric surgeon, he would not be in this unprecedented situation.

Anonymous