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The parents of a victim of the Nottingham attacks have said medical staff have a duty to breach patient confidentiality if the person they are treating is a risk to others.
The families of the victims of the June 2023 attacks spoke at a news conference in London on Monday after evidence concluded in a 14-week public inquiry into the attacks.
They said local authorities had protected Valdo Calocane at the expense of public safety in the years before he stabbed Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates to death. The families said the tragedy would happen again without immediate action by the government.
Webber and O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and Coates, 65, were killed in the the early hours of 13 June 2023. Calocane, who has paranoid schizophrenia, was convicted of three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in January 2024.
O’Malley-Kumar’s mother, Sinead O’Malley-Kumar, said “a lot of the fault lies” with the psychiatrists involved in Calocane’s care. She said she would “never forgive them for their lack of treatment and their incompetent discharge” of him.
The inquiry heard how Calocane was discharged from mental health services months before the attacks because healthcare workers could not find him.
“I blame the psychiatrists for discharging him,” she said. “I do not believe they’re fit to practise and I think the regulator does need to take a look at some of these psychiatrists.”
The public inquiry, led by the retired judge Deborah Taylor KC, was set up to examine the lead-up to the attacks and the response. The hearings exposed the repeated contact medical staff and police had with Calocane and a string of violent attacks he had committed before June 2023.
Calocane was sectioned four times before June 2023, the first in May 2020. Many of the interventions happened after Calocane had committed a violent attack. During his second hospital admission, the inquiry heard how a doctor warned Calocane could “end up killing someone”.
At the beginning of the inquiry, two police forces apologised to bereaved families and survivors of the Nottingham attacks for failing to act on an arrest warrant for Calocane that was issued 10 months before he killed Webber, O’Malley-Kumar and Coates.
The inquiry heard about the failure to share information across different agencies including police and medical staff as well as with Calocane’s family. In evidence given at the inquiry, Calocane’s mother, Celeste, said she was not aware of decisions made about her son’s care until after the June 2023 attacks – including his fourth hospital admission in 2022.
She said Calocane had withdrawn his consent for details to be shared with her in December 2021 but she said he did not have the capacity to make that decision.
Speaking after a news conference in central London, Grace’s parents, Sanjoy Kumar and Sinead O’Malley-Kumar, who are both medical doctors, said medical staff had a duty to breach confidentiality guidelines if public safety was at risk.
“I think the safety of society as a whole, even as a doctor, overrides the autonomy of a single patient,” Kumar said.
“There are well-laid guidelines, if a doctor knows that a patient may bring harm to someone else, the doctors are obliged to actually break that confidentiality. It didn’t happen in our case.”
The families of Webber, O’Malley-Kumar and Coates said the inquiry had laid bare a “lack of candour and blatant cover-ups” and left them with “many more questions”.
Coates’s son Lee added: “It has shown the catastrophic failings from all services and agencies involved.”
Emma Webber, Barnaby’s mother, said the inquiry hearings had been “brutal, bruising and harrowing beyond measure”, adding: “Mental health services failed to treat and manage. Police repeatedly failed to act. Agencies didn’t talk. Individuals chose to look the other way.”
Taylor is expected to hear closing statements from core participants in the inquiry in September and is expected to publish her final report with recommendations next year.
A spokesperson for Nottinghamshire Healthcare said: “Lessons and recommendations for the NHS, and many other organisations, are likely to emerge from the Nottingham Inquiry and we are committed to acting upon them and working with our partners to reduce the risk of terrible events like this happening in the future.”
