Jenny Vaughan, who has died aged 55 of cancer, was a consultant neurologist best known for her courageous campaigning to reform the law on gross negligence manslaughter, and end the blame game in healthcare.
She fearlessly championed two doctors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter: the surgeon David Sellu and paediatrician Hadiza Bawa-Garba. On the back of these cases, she set up with others the Doctors’ Association UK and led its “Learn Not Blame” campaign to achieve a “just culture” in healthcare, which helped to reduce significantly the number of investigations into this crime.
In 2013, Vaughan was astonished that Sellu, her colleague at Ealing hospital, in west London, was in Belmarsh prison, convicted of gross negligence manslaughter. The colorectal surgeon also worked at the private Clementine Churchill hospital in Harrow, north-west London, and in 2010 had been asked to review a patient there with abdominal pain. A scan showed the patient had a perforated bowel, an emergency condition, but Sellu was unable to operate straight away as the hospital did not have available a suitable anaesthetist or operating theatre. He operated later, but the patient, who had liver cirrhosis as well, died two days later in intensive care. Sellu was tried at the Old Bailey in 2013 and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.
Vaughan contacted Sellu’s wife, who also worked at Ealing hospital. They created a website, Friends of David Sellu, and started raising money, combing evidence and drumming up support.
Lawyers advised Vaughan the chances of getting an appeal off the ground were minuscule. But she pressed on, digging up fresh evidence that had not been presented at Sellu’s trial, and when Sellu was released from prison in February 2015, he was thereby granted leave to appeal.
In November 2016 his conviction was quashed by three appeal court judges – not because of the new evidence, but on the grounds that the original judge had not properly directed the jury. What are the criteria for gross negligence manslaughter as related to healthcare? It seemed at Sellu’s original trial, no one knew – not the police, the coroner or even the judge.
Sellu said: “Jenny was a great warrior. She overturned my case against all the odds.”
Vaughan continued to speak out widely, articulating the unease many felt. Could any healthcare worker be incarcerated for their hospital’s inadequacies or for making a simple mistake? Vaughan said healthcare workers should not be above the law, but the law needed clarifying. She persuaded people that there is no societal benefit to rush to criminalise doctors and the bar should be higher: someone accused of this crime should have exhibited reckless behaviour, equivalent, for example, to deliberately driving down the wrong side of the road.
Vaughan also supported Bawa-Garba, who in 2015 was found guilty of the manslaughter of a child, Jack Adcock, through gross negligence and was given a two-year suspended sentence. The General Medical Council took legal action to get Bawa-Garba permanently struck off the medical register, but in the end the court of appeal found in her favour in 2018 and she was allowed back to work the following year. As the case unfolded, reports emerged of concerns at Leicester Royal Infirmary, where Bawa-Garba worked, at the time of Jack’s death in 2011. These included lack of training, understaffing, huge workloads, rota gaps, IT failures and more. Many junior doctors in the UK worked in the same conditions and worried that they could be next.
Following Bawa-Garba’s conviction, Vaughan had discussions with the then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and in 2018 he ordered a rapid policy review conducted by Prof Sir Norman Williams. It made many recommendations including a threshold for what constitutes “exceptionally bad performance”, which the Crown Prosecution Service and others must adhere to. Since then, the number of investigations into this crime has fallen to single figures.
Born in Bristol, Jenny was the middle child of Elizabeth (nee Bessant), a nurse who later taught history, and Leslie Vaughan, a teacher. She attended Redmaids school, a highlight of which time was a school trip to Moscow in 1982. Two years later she travelled solo by train through iron curtain countries to visit her penpal in Hungary.
Vaughan then studied medicine at Nottingham University. Graduating in 1992, she spent time working in Madagascar before moving to London. In 1996-99 she studied for a PhD in the neurogenetics of Parkinson’s disease at University College London and became a consultant neurologist at Ealing in 2003.
Vaughan combined working full-time with activism: from 1998 to 2006 she was a Labour councillor in Fulham. She had a strong Christian faith and was impelled to protest against injustice wherever she saw it. In 2005 she and a fellow neurologist, David Nicholl, graphically enacted force-feeding outside the American Embassy in London in protest at the practice being used to keep detainees alive in Guantánamo Bay. Vaughan damned it as “medicalised torture”.
She successfully spearheaded opposition to the closure of the accident and emergency department at Ealing in 2013, and in 2018 came the co-founding of the Doctors’ Association UK. In the Covid-19 crisis, she created an app for frontline doctors to report shortages of PPE.
The same year Vaughan received the BMJ editor’s award for “speaking truth to power” and in 2019 Bapio (British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin) gave her an award in acknowledgement of her support of BAME doctors.
At university she had met Matt Dunckley, who later became a surgeon. The pair married in 1993 and had two sons, Jonathan and Christopher. At home they had several pet tortoises, as Vaughan had a lifelong love of these reptiles. A holiday to the Galápagos Islands to see giant tortoises was a particular highlight for her.
In 2017, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and in 2020 she had to retire from the NHS on health grounds. She kept campaigning, however, and was appointed OBE in 2023.
She is survived by her husband and two sons, and by her mother and her sister, Lise, and brother, Andrew.
• Jennifer Rosemary Vaughan, consultant neurologist and campaigner, born 25 June 1968; died 31 March 2024
