THE Home Office pathologist who carried out the post-mortem into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot by police on the London Underground, has been found guilty of serious professional misconduct after he altered his findings in a separate post mortem involving a hospital death in Yorkshire.
The General Medical Council (GMC) found that alterations made by Kenneth Shorrock in both the post mortem and subsequent police statements "were unprofessional, inconsistent, unreasonable, inappropriate, and not based upon the medical and pathologica
l information available to him; and that they were likely to bring the medical profession into disrepute".
The discrepancies in his accounts of the death of a patient at Dewsbury and District Hospital were first revealed by the Yorkshire Post in 2004.
The GMC had pressed for Dr Shorrock, from Sheffield, to be struck off, but the fitness to practise panel, meeting in Manchester, decided that a reprimand was a suitable punishment for a man with an otherwise unblemished record.
The case revolved around a post mortem he conducted on January 31, 2000, following the death of Gladys Allen, 78, on a hospital operating table.
She died at Dewsbury and District Hospital after consultant urologist Hurais Syed operated to remove a cancerous kidney.
Dr Shorrock, then a consultant pathologist at the Royal Halifax Hospital but now a Home Office pathologist, carried out a post-mortem in which he concluded Mrs Allen was given "necessary surgery" by Mr Syed.
He added: "In my opinion there is no definite evidence of any avoidable deficiency in the medical or surgical treatment that she received."
But in December 2000 Dr Shorrock produced a second post mortem report, which omitted the word "necessary" and the latter sentence altogether.
The pathologist told the GMC hearing he had altered his report 11 months later after a conversation with West Yorkshire Coroner Roger Whitaker who told him questions had been raised about Mr Syed's clinical performance following other deaths after surgery.
During a West Yorkshire Police investigation into the deaths, which resulted in Mr Syed being charged with manslaughter over Mrs Allen's death, Dr Shorrock went further in a statement in October 2001 in which he said it was "likely that death was contributed to by inadvertence, both before and during the operation".
The panel also found that the pathologist had changed material facts from those recorded in his initial post mortem to those given in a later police statement which had "significant implications as to the competence of the operating surgeon" and for which he "had no sufficient reason to do".
Mr Syed was charged in April 2002 but the case against him was dropped on the orders of a Leeds Crown Court judge the following year.
Dr Shorrock's conduct was criticised by two forensic pathologists who gave evidence to the hearing, Prof Peter Vanezis and Prof Derrick Pounder, who both said his actions "had fallen below the standards to be expected of a pathologist carrying out a post-mortem examination and reporting it to the coroner's court and to the criminal court".
The reprimand is the lowest form of censure, and Dr Shorrock will be allowed to carry on practising medicine without any conditions.
