Gabriel Scally (physician)

Professor Gabriel John Scally FFPHM (born 24 September 1954) is a Northern Irish public health physician and a former regional director of public health (RDPH) for the south west of England. He is a visiting professor of public health at the University of Bristol and president of the section of epidemiology and public health of the Royal Society of Medicine. Previously he was professor of public health and planning, and director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments, both at the University of the West of England (UWE), and chair of the Trustees of the Soil Association. He is a member of the Independent SAGE group, formed during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Gabriel Scally

FFPHM
Born
Gabriel John Scally

(1954-09-24) 24 September 1954
Belfast, Northern Ireland
NationalityNorthern Irish
EducationQueen's University Belfast
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Medical career
ProfessionPublic health physician
Notable worksDonaldsons' Essential Public Health

Prior to his roles in public health, Scally trained in general practice. He spent his early career in Northern Ireland as chief administrative medical officer and director of public health for the Eastern Health and Social Services Board, where he contributed to the founding of a young people's sexual health service.

After moving to England, he led several inquiries into serious NHS clinical failures including pathology in Swindon, breast screening in Exeter and abuse in Winterbourne. He is credited, along with Sir Liam Donaldson, as defining clinical governance, a concept developed following high-profile cases such as the Bristol heart scandal, the Shipman Inquiry and the Alder Hey organs scandal.

He resigned as RDPH in 2012, and was appointed as an associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and as a visiting professor at the University of Bristol and UWE. In 2018, he assisted in an inquiry into the deaths of children from hyponatremia in Northern Ireland and led an independent inquiry into the CervicalCheck cancer scandal and the failures of cervical screening in the Republic of Ireland. In 2020, he co-authored an editorial in the British Medical Journal questioning the UK's response to COVID-19.

Early life and education
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where Scally studied public health

Gabriel Scally was born in September 1954 in Belfast,[1] where his father Brian Scally was a consultant psychiatrist at the Muckamore Abbey Hospital.[2] He attended St Mary's Christian Brothers Grammar School before gaining admission to study medicine at Queen's University Belfast.[3] As a medical student in 1977, he had visited Chile on behalf of the International Union of Students.[4] In 1978 he graduated from Queen's University Belfast before completing his master's degree in community medicine (later called public health) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1982.[1][5]

Northern Ireland

Scally completed his early medical training in Northern Ireland. Prior to his roles in public health, he worked in general practice.[1][6] For four years from 1989 he was director of public health for the Eastern Health and Social Services Board and chief administrative officer in Northern Ireland.[7]

Despite opposition, he contributed to the founding of a young people's sexual health service.[5] With reference to health in Northern Ireland, he had voiced his concerns in the Opsahl inquiry that the Troubles had set back significant time and discussion about important health determinants because of attention diverted to media and politics.[7][8] This, in turn, caused "policy deficit", a term he coined.[9][10]

England

In 1993 he moved to England to take up the post of regional director of public health (RDPH) first for South East Thames and later for the South and West Regional Health Authority.[1][11]

In 1998, together with Sir Liam Donaldson in Donaldsons' Essential Public Health, he defined clinical governance as:

a framework through which NHS organisations are accountable for continually improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish.[6][12][13]

The concept evolved in response to high-profile cases such as the Bristol heart scandal, the Shipman Inquiry and the Alder Hey organs scandal.[14] In light of the increasing number of public health personnel not trained in medicine, he advocated that they also be subject to statutory regulation.[15][16]

Subsequently, during his position as RDPH in England, he became involved in a number of clinical failure inquiries, including pathology in Swindon, breast screening in Exeter and abuse in Winterbourne.[5][11][17][18] He also led public health improvement programmes including Smokefree South West and Healthy Schools Plus and the creation of the Office of Sexual Health.[19]

In March 2012, wishing to oppose the then Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley's, plans for the NHS, Scally resigned from England's Department of Health as a consequence of the then Conservative-Liberal Democrats' coalition government's health policies. Subsequently, he was appointed as an associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, and as a visiting chair at the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England, where he was also director the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Healthy Urban Environments.[5][11][20][21]

In 2017 he was appointed president of the epidemiology and public health section of the Royal Society of Medicine.[5][22] He is also chairman of the Soil Association.[5]

In 2018, he assisted with a report following the inquiry into the deaths of children from hyponatraemia in Northern Ireland.[23][24]

Cervical screening

Beginning in May 2018, Scally led an independent inquiry into the failures of cervical screening and CervicalCheck in the Republic of Ireland, following an audit which revealed potential errors in women diagnosed with cervical cancer.[23][25] His findings, including his concerns of the attitudes of some oncologists,[26] were reported in the Scally Report in 2018.[27][28]

COVID-19

In May 2020, alongside Bobbie Jacobson from Johns Hopkins University and Kamran Abbasi from the British Medical Journal, Scally co-authored an editorial in the British Medical Journal titled "The UK's public health response to covid-19".[29] They described the UK's response to the COVID-19 pandemic as "too little, too late, too flawed", with no adequate plan for community-based case-finding, testing, and contact tracing.[30][31] Their findings were published in the New Statesman,[31] and discussed in Medscape,[32] the British Journal of Social Psychology[33] and the Practice Nurse.[30] Former director of public health, Marie Armitage, described the editorial as a "clear, concise analysis and call to action".[34] In the same year he became a member of the Independent SAGE committee.[5][35]

Scally has also expressed concerns about the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland in the newspaper Barron's,[36] the government's plans to end Public Health England (PHE),[37] and the implementation of Operation Moonshot.[38]

Selected publications
  • Liam J. Donaldson; Gabriel Scally (2009). Donaldsons' Essential Public Health. Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84619-209-8.

References
  1. Scally, Gabriel (2019) "Curriculum Vitae". The Inquiry into Hyponatraemia-related Deaths. www.ihrdni.org. May 2019
  2. Graham, Seanín (9 March 2020). "Leading figure Professor Gabriel Scally offers to oversee Muckamore abuse probe". The Irish News. Retrieved 30 September 2020.
  3. "Prof Gabriel Scally MB MSc DSc FRCP MRCGP FFPH". World Federation of Public Health Associations
  4. Scally, Gabriel (1 March 1986). "Doctors and torture". British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Ed.). 292 (6520): 627. ISSN 0267-0623. PMC 1339614.
  5. "Biographical Details for Dr Gabriel Scally – Scoping Inquiry into the CervicalCheck Screening Programme". Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  6. "Gabriel Scally". The King's Fund. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  7. "Four Decades of Public Health; Northern Ireland’s health boards 1973 – 2009. pp. 28–29
  8. "CAIN: Democratic Dialogue – Making Democracy Work: participation and politics in Northern Ireland". cain.ulster.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 September 2020.
  9. Trench, Alan (2015). Has Devolution Made a Difference?: The State of the Nations 2004. Andrews UK Limited. ISBN 978-1-84540-547-2.
  10. Mitchell, James (19 July 2013). Devolution in the UK. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-84779-523-6.
  11. “Written submission from Professor Gabriel Scally. “The role of local authorities in health issues”, published by House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee. p. 62
  12. M.S. John Pathy; Alan J. Sinclair; John E. Morley (2006). Principles and Practice of Geriatric Medicine. John Wiley & Sons. p. 1875. ISBN 978-0-470-09056-5.
  13. James, Adrian J. B.; Kendall, Tim; Worrall, Adrian (2005). Clinical Governance in Mental Health and Learning Disability Services: A Practical Guide. RCPsych Publications. ISBN 978-1-904671-12-1.
  14. "Define clinical governance for the individual". Hospital Dr. 29 July 2013. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
  15. Health, Great Britain: Department of (2012). Government response to the House of Commons Health Committee report on public health (twelfth report of session 2010–12). The Stationery Office. ISBN 978-0-10-182902-1.
  16. Healthy lives, healthy people: update and way forward. The Stationery Office. 2011. ISBN 978-0-10-181342-6.
  17. Sample, Ian; Elgot, Jessica; Pidd, Helen; Bannock, Caroline (7 September 2020). "Coronavirus: fears UK government has lost control as Covid cases soar". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
  18. Bristol, University of. "People". www.bristol.ac.uk. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  19. "UWE appoints Gabriel Scally as director of WHO research centre – UWE Bristol: News Releases". info.uwe.ac.uk. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  20. Ring, Evelyn (9 July 2009). "Dr Gabriel Scally: CervicalCheck controversy 'completely lacked grace or compassion'". Irish Examiner. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  21. Little, Joe (8 May 2018). "Cervical Check inquiry – Who is Dr Gabriel Scally?". Raidió Teilifís Éireann.
  22. "Epidemiology & Public Health Section | The Royal Society of Medicine". www.rsm.ac.uk. Retrieved 17 September 2020.
  23. Louise Cummings (2020). "5.2 Logical and non-logical uses of expertise". Fallacies in Medicine and Health: Critical Thinking, Argumentation and Communication. Springer Nature. p. 155. ISBN 978-3-030-28513-5.
  24. The Inquiry into Hyponatraemia-related Deaths (PDF). Digital Print Services of the Northern Ireland Department of Finance. 2018. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-912313-04-4.
  25. Browne, Kath; Calkin, Sydney (2020). After Repeal: Rethinking Abortion Politics. Zed Books. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-78699-717-3.
  26. Heavey, Patrick (2 January 2019). "Serious Ethical Violations in Medicine: The Irish Situation". The American Journal of Bioethics. 19 (1): 39–41. doi:10.1080/15265161.2018.1544318. ISSN 1526-5161. PMID 31307363. S2CID 86712908.
  27. Scally, Gabriel (September 2018) "Scoping Inquiry into the CervicalCheck Screening Programme". Final Report
  28. Ryan, Paul M; Ryan, C Anthony (2019). "Mining Google Trends Data for Health Information: The Case of the Irish "CervicalCheck" Screening Programme Revelations". Cureus. 11 (8): e5513. doi:10.7759/cureus.5513. ISSN 2168-8184. PMC 6818734. PMID 31687289.
  29. Scally, Gabriel; Jacobson, Bobbie; Abbasi, Kamran (15 May 2020). "The UK's public health response to covid-19". British Medical Journal. 369: m1932. doi:10.1136/bmj.m1932. ISSN 1756-1833. PMID 32414712. S2CID 218657917.
  30. "Practice Nurse". practicenurse.co.uk. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
  31. "Too little, too late, too flawed: the BMJ on the UK response to Covid-19". www.newstatesman.com. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  32. Locke, Tim (16 May 2020). "UK COVID-19 Daily: 'Stop Squabbling' Over Schools Reopening". Medscape. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  33. Drury, John; Reicher, Stephen; Stott, Clifford (2020). "COVID-19 in context: Why do people die in emergencies? It's probably not because of collective psychology". British Journal of Social Psychology. 59 (3): 686–693. doi:10.1111/bjso.12393. ISSN 2044-8309. PMC 7323329. PMID 32543713.
  34. Armitage, Marie (19 June 2020). "Covid-19: public health expertise is being sidelined". BMJ. 369: m2454. doi:10.1136/bmj.m2454. ISSN 1756-1833. PMID 32561510. S2CID 219897322.
  35. "Who is independent SAGE? -". 4 May 2020. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  36. Stenson, Joe. "Does Virus Crisis Stoke Case For United Ireland?". www.barrons.com. Retrieved 17 September 2020.
  37. "Public Health England set to be scrapped". Hospital Times. 17 August 2020. Retrieved 17 September 2020.
  38. Booth, William; Adam, Karla. "Boris Johnson's 'Operation Moonshot' envisions weekly coronavirus tests for every person in Britain". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 17 September 2020.

Further reading
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