Browse Sections

• Education
• Roadworks
• Shipman 
  • Uncovering the Truth
  • Guilty
  • The Inquests
  • The Evidence Mounts
  • March 1998
  • Fight for Justice
  • The Inquiry
  • Making a Drama
  • The Baker Report
  • The End
• Special reports

Doctor featured on television in 1982

1/11/2002

HAROLD Shipman made an appearance on the television programme World in Action in 1982, talking about caring for patients in the community.

Interviewed at his desk at Donneybrook House, a group practice in Hyde, Shipman talks enthusiastically about a new type of treatment for the mentally ill.

The footage was rediscovered nearly 20 years later and aired in 2000, months after he had been convicted for the murder of 15 patients at Preston Crown Court.

Shipman - aged 37 at the time - said: "If you can stay in the community and receive your treatment in the community and if you have your family around you and your usual friends, then this all adds to the speed of the recovery from the illness."

The medic also adds: "It means that someone can go and be seen at Brindle House directly from our surgery and they can walk up the road and be seen within half an hour.

"In the past, if a patient had got a mental illness that required admission to hospital then the patient was formally admitted, undressed and placed into a bed and was treated though they had a physical illness.

"A consultant would often come around in a white coat and there was an invisible barrier between the patient and the doctor."