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TWO
former nursery nurses are to report a consultant
paediatrician to the medical disciplinary body after she
made a series of errors while examining children which
led to a report branding the pair as paedophiles.
Dawn
Reed, 31, and Christopher Lillie, 37, were forced to
flee their homes and contemplated suicide after they
were wrongly accused of sexually abusing children in
their care.
Now
they are considering lodging a complaint against Dr
Camille San Lazaro with the General Medical Council.
They
were each awarded £200,000 libel damages from the
authors of a 1998 report which claimed that they had
molested youngsters and been part of a paedophile ring.
Mr
Justice Eady, in his judgment on Tuesday, said that the
pair had clearly never abused any of their charges at
Shieldfield nursery in Newcastle upon Tyne, and added
that the review, commissioned by Newcastle City Council,
was a shambles.
In
his 700-page ruling the judge said that the four authors
“clearly fell under the spell” of Dr Lazaro, a
consultant at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle,
and a senior lecturer in paediatric forensic medicine at
Newcastle University.
But
the judge ruled that she was “unbalanced, obsessive and
lacking in judgment”, and gave “untrue accounts” to the
criminal injuries compensation board during the libel
hearing. She had examined 53 children and made a number
of findings of abuse.
Dr
Lazaro, who was appointed OBE in 1999 for services in
the care of sexually abused children, has also
championed the drive to stop parents smacking
youngsters.
Yesterday
Mr Lillie and Ms Reed said that the impact of the
allegations in the document meant that they still feared
for their lives.
Ms
Reed, who is too afraid to go out alone, said: “We’ve
been branded as probably the worst thing anyone could
imagine: a paedophile. Once you have been tarred with
that brush there’s nothing that can take it away. It’s
horrific.”
She
said the pressures of falsely being accused of being a
child abuser were so immense that at one point she
considered driving off a cliff in South Shields. She now
tries to avoid children and could never work with them
again.
Mr
Lillie said: “Suicide was in the back of my mind once
the report came out. I could feel all the hurt of
everybody I loved.”
Len
Fenwick, the chief executive of Newcastle upon Tyne
Hospitals where Dr Lazaro worked, said that executives
at the hospital were studying the judge’s findings. He
insisted that Dr Lazaro was a committed and caring
professional who was regarded as an international expert
in child abuse.
Dr
Lazaro was unavailable for
comment. | 