ABSTRACT

A few years ago a hospital sister was suspended from her job and then given ‘a final formal warning’ for, on a consultant’s instruction, having added haloperidol (a tranquillising medication) to the tea of a 91 year old who was attending a day hospital for the elderly. The patient had resisted all efforts to persuade him to be admitted to hospital. The team felt that he was hypomanic and unsafe to return to his old people’s home without treatment. The consultant who had given the instruction to the sister was also upbraided: his medical director likened the action to having intercourse with a patient, ‘it may not harm the patient but it is equally wrong’ (Kellett 1996: 1250).1