Hospital staff 'knew about Shipman patient's overdose'

Hospital doctors knew that Harold Shipman had injected a woman with a fatal overdose of diamorphine but they did nothing about it, according to testimony given at the public inquiry into the GP's 215 murders.

Shipman's "clear and obvious" culpability in the case of Renate Overton, 47, was the talk of Tameside Hospital, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, and was even detailed in her medical notes as she lay in a coma, brain-damaged by the 20mg of diamorphine he had injected into her. But no one questioned his explanations, even though they were clearly self-contradictory.

"Numerous references" in Mrs Overton's notes point to the fact that diamorphine [the drug Shipman always used on his victims] had been the cause of her collapse, said Dr Christopher Melton QC, the senior counsel to the inquiry. "Almost all the staff realised and discussed the fact [but] none of them ... could have imagined this a deliberate act to harm or kill a patient."

When Mrs Overton's death 15 months later was registered on 4 May 1995, the cause was recorded as attributable to hypoxic cerebral degeneration ­ a "natural cause".